Publicaties

Op basis van de agencytheorie is het aannemelijk dat het gedrag van auditors via financiële prikkels beter in overeenstemming kan worden gebracht met de doelstellingen van het auditkantoor waarbinnen ze werkzaam zijn. In deze studie onderzoeken we welke factoren een rol spelen in de verloning van Belgische auditpartners. Meer in het bijzonder onderzoeken we de verschillen tussen partnerverloningstructuren in Big Four en Non-Big Four ...

This study, based upon four Belgian case studies, provides insights on (1) what drives the audit committee to look for the support of the internal audit function; and (2) what makes the internal audit function an expert at providing comfort to the audit committee (Pentland, 1993; Carrington and Catasús, 2007). We found that audit committees seek comfort, with respect to the control environment and internal controls, two areas in which they ...

This dissertation comprises three distinct empirical studies investigating the influence of audit firms, offices, and partners on audit outcomes. Based on data from sixteen European countries, I examine if audit firms can maintain consistency across their engagements, that is, across the offices and partners within their network. In the first study, I examine if financial statement comparability is greater if clients have the same audit firm and ...

Anhand von Prüfungshonorardaten des belgischen Abschlussprüfungsmarktes wird analysiert, ob eine Differenzierung der Prüfungsqualität auf der Ebene der individuell beauftragten Prüfungspartner existiert. Die empirischen Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Markt für Abschlussprüfungen eine Differenzierung der Prüfungsqualität innerhalb Prüfungsgesellschaften anerkennt, indem individuellen Prüfungspartnern, die weiblich und weniger erfahren sind, zur ...

As a result of legal and regulatory requirements, audit firms in certain jurisdictions have recently started issuing transparency reports containing information on audit firm governance. In this study we investigate whether audit firm governance disclosure is associated with actual audit quality. Based on a sample of transparency reports of 103 audit firms in a number of EU countries, we find that there is variation in the extent and type of ...

We study what determines the involvement of component auditors in multinational enterprise (MNE) group audits and the association with audit quality and audit fees. Using unique Australian disclosures of group audit fees paid to the principal and component auditors, we first document that MNE complexity, MNE internationalization, and auditor characteristics are associated with component auditor involvement, and extent and type of component ...

This paper documents that in Indonesia, where litigation risk is low and foreign audit firms can only enter the market through affiliation with a local audit firm, the appointment of a local audit firm affiliated either with a Big4 or a second-tier audit firm reduces the cost of debt for listed companies significantly. This finding holds irrespective of the risk profile of the client and is independent of whether or not we control for endogenous ...

We develop a model of audit production based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) using labor cost as input and hours spent on evidence-gathering activities that determine the level of assurance as output. Client characteristics are considered exogenous factors that affect audit production as a whole. We apply the model to a sample of U.S.-based engagements from an international accounting firm. Results indicate that a constrained DEA model using ...

In the first chapter of the disseration we study whether the similarity between a pair of clients located in the same market segment is associated with the likelihood of choosing the same audit firm and whether this affects audit market competition. As we use archival data to investigate audit firm selection and only observe supply and demand forces in the equilibrium, we keep supply-side factors as constant as possible to be able to attribute ...