演讲题目： Auditor Response to Client Litigation Risk and the Impact on Audit Quality
演 讲 者： Szu-fan Chen
Assistant Professor
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
演讲时间： 2016年12月23日（周五）上午 10：00 - 11:30
演讲地点：嘉庚二205室
主 持 人：郑祯 助理教授
参 加 者：对会计、财务研究有兴趣的师生
讲座简介：Since auditors can increase fees to improve the audit process or resign from engagements, they do not face the same litigation risks as their clients. As in recent studies, we show that less than 20 percent of auditors are named as defendants when their clients are involved in private securities class action lawsuits. Most of the client characteristics that predict client risk lose their explanatory power when they are used to predict audit risk. We then show that the relationship between litigation risk and audit quality is conditional on the strategies taken by auditors. Auditors who resign from an engagement when faced with imminent client litigation provide lower-quality audits than those who stay. Moreover, auditors who have resigned are succeeded by auditors who provide audits of even lower quality and charge lower fees. The fees of new auditors reflect a risk premium, as they are positively related to auditor litigation but not to client litigation. Auditors who stay charge higher fees, and the fees reflect more of an audit effort than a risk premium, as they are negatively related to auditor litigation. In summary, for clients who experience an auditor switch, the litigation risk leads to lower audit quality. In contrast, audit quality increases for clients whose auditors do not resign before the manipulation period.