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Literature Review On Audit Quality

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This section discussed the previous reviews of literatures related to the topic. The focus of this study is to test whether the market-perceived audit quality captures actual audit quality. It also investigates the relationships among actual audit quality measured by a post hoc identification of auditor failures and earnings management as well as financial analysts’ forecast errors. Prior literature in audit quality, earnings management and financial analysts’ forecast errors are reviewed in this section.

AUDIT QUALITY AND ACTUAL AUDIT QUALITY
Audit quality has been a topic of significant interest in accounting research. In order to improve the understanding of audit quality, numerous studies have tried to detect the association between audit …show more content…
Specifically, if the compensation of managers is associated with companies’ performance, managers have incentives to misreport earnings. “The demand for auditing services arises from a need to facilitate dealings between the parties involved in business relationships such as shareholders, creditors, public authorities, employees and customers, etc. Exchanges between such parties are usually costly since informational asymmetries give rise to uncertainty concerning the performance of the contractual obligations” (Arrunada, 2000). The function of auditing is to mitigate information asymmetries among related parties. High audit quality should be related to low levels of information asymmetry and low levels of “uncertainty concerning performance.” Therefore, audit quality should be negatively related to earnings …show more content…
Assuming that managers have incentives to minimize the difference between management forecasted earnings and reported earnings, Davidson and Neu (1993) argue that higher auditor quality should be associated with larger management earnings forecast errors. Specifically, they find that Big 8 accounting firms are associated with larger management earnings forecast errors. Clarkson (2000) extends Davidson and Neu’s (1993) study for two distinct time periods in Canada. During the first period, 1984-1987, Canadian auditors had a responsibility to review management’s earnings forecasts.
During the second period, 1992-1995, Canadian auditors audited management’s earnings forecasts. Using data from the audit assurance period, Clarkson (2000) documents that Big 6 auditors are associated with smaller, not larger, absolute earnings forecast errors. The contrast between these two testing periods suggests that whether management’s earnings forecasts are independent from audit quality has an impact on the ability to use management’s earnings forecast errors to measure audit quality. Other studies have investigated the association between audit quality and management forecast errors in an IPO

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