This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?
Auditing has been a subject of some controversy, and there have been repeated attempts at reforming its practice globally. This comprehensive companion surveys the state of the discipline, including emerging and cutting-edge trends. It covers the most important and controversial issues, including auditing ethics, auditor independence, social and environmental accounting as well as the future of the field. This handbook is vital reading for legislators, regulators, professionals, commentators, students and researchers involved with auditing and accounting. The collection will also prove an ideal starting place for researchers from other fields looking to break into this vital subject.
This book focuses on market mechanisms which protect quality in the provision of audit services. The role of public regulation is thus situated in the context defmed by the presence of these safeguard mechanisms. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of these market mechanisms, which helps in defining the con tent of rules and the function of regulatory bodies in facilitating and strengthening the protective operation of the market. An analysis at a more general level is provided in the three chapters making up Part 1. In the four chapters of Part 2, on the other hand, this analysis is applied to a particular problem to determine how those non-audit services often provided by auditors to their audit clients should be regulated. Finally, Chapter 8 contains a summary of the analysis and conclusions of the work. The conclusion with regard to non-audit services is that their provision generates beneficial effects in terms of costs, technical competence, professional judgment and competition and, moreover, need not prejudice auditor independence or the quality of these services. This as sessment leads, in the normative sphere, to recommending a legislative policy aimed at facilitating the development and use of safeguards provided by the free action of market forces. Regulation should thus aim to enable the parties-audit firms, self-regulatory bodies and audit clients-to discover through competitive market interaction both the most efficient mix of services and the corresponding quality safeguards, adjusting for the costs and benefits of each possibility.
Ethnostatistics is concerned with understanding how statistics are actually constructed and used by social scientists and professionals. While the conventional field of statistics emphasizes formal rules and rational methods for creating reliable and valid counts and measures of social phenomena, ethnostatistics addresses how interpretive work and informal practices that are needed to produce statistics interact with formal, technical knowledge to shape statistical outcomes. The goal is to develop a social theory of measurement that explains the construction, use, and meaning of statistics in scientific and professional life. Ethnostatistics thus provides important insights into essential but neglected features of statistics production and use. It addresses how practical knowledge, informal practices, and research settings influence the construction of statistics; it provides new tools to help researchers determine the appropriateness of the assumptions made in using statistics; and it reveals how quantitative research uses literary practices to present and interpret numbers for rhetorical purposes. Three levels of ethnostatistics are explored. Level 1, producing statistics, uses ethnographies to describe how qualitative observations are undertaken and transformed into numerals and measures. Level 2, statistics at work, uses computer simulations to assess implicit assumptions and informal practices in measurement. Level 3, the rhetoric of statistics, explores how statistics are used for persuasive purposes in scientific texts. These levels are illustrated with examples from economics, psychology, sociology, social studies of science, management research, and organization theory. Ethnostatistics is extended into other domains including qualimetrics, methodological myths and urban legends, and bibliometric assessments of academic performance.
Audit Regulations, Audit Market Structure, and Financial Reporting Quality provides a structured overview of the empirical and analytical literature on the effects of audit market regulations. After a short introduction, the monograph is organized as follows. Chapter II addresses the structure of the audit markets of industrialized countries. First presenting an overview of the concentration metrics used to describe the structure of an audit market or a market segment, then providing the empirical findings on audit market concentration at the national level and presenting an overview of the main reasons that led to the currently high degree of concentration. Chapter III summarizes the reasons why regulators worldwide consider a high degree of concentration to be a concern. In particular, it reviews the regulator's assumption that a high degree of concentration inevitably leads to a low degree of competition and to the corresponding effects of low audit quality and high audit fees. It also provides an overview of the empirical findings on the association between concentration and audit quality and fees, respectively. Chapter IV introduces the mandatory audit firm rotation, the prohibition on the joint supply of audit and non-audit services, and joint audits as examples for regulations that are likely to have both incentive and market structure effects. Chapter V summarizes the empirical findings on the effects of these regulations on audit quality and market structure. Chapter VI summarizes models that regard the market structure as given. The results from these models show that the effects of regulations are not straightforward, but depend on various factors related to the auditor, the client, and the legal environment. Chapter VII gives an overview of analytical research that simultaneously considers incentive effects and market structure effects. It also provides a brief overview of industrial organization models that seem suitable to expand the models applied to investigate the effects of audit regulations. Chapter VIII concludes and highlights avenues for future research.
