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This study aims to examine the relation between a client’s relative economic importance to its auditor and the number of key audit matters (KAMs) reported in the expanded audit report.

The authors measure a client’s economic importance at the audit firm level as well as the audit partner level using the ratio of a client’s total fees to an auditor’s total fees earned from its listed clients and the ratio of a client’s audit fees to an auditor’s total audit fees from its listed clients. The authors estimate a multivariate regression model using a sample of New Zealand-listed company-years from 2017 to 2019.

Results reveal a positive relation between client importance to auditor and the number of KAMs disclosed. Furthermore, the positive association between client importance and the number of KAMs reported is more pronounced for clients audited by the Big 4 auditors and less experienced audit partners. These findings suggest that auditors’ incentive to protect against potential losses from important client engagements outweighs any impairment to auditor independence and leads to a higher number of KAMs reported for the economically more important clients. Overall, the results suggest that auditors report KAMs strategically to mitigate engagement risks.

This study provides the first evidence on how client economic importance relates to the disclosure in the expanded audit report and contributes to the dialogue on auditors’ reporting of KAMs in the Asia-Pacific region.

COVID-19 has forced audit firms to change the way they operate. One change has been to rely more on information technology (IT) and IT human capital to overcome COVID-19-related challenges. We refer to audit firms’ use of these two resources as audit firm informatization (AFI). It is important to understand whether AFI helps audit firms address challenges created by the pandemic. Thus, this study examines the impact of AFI on audit quality during the COVID-19 pandemic in China with a focus on IT human capital.

We use a mixed-methods approach. First, we perform multivariate regression analyses on archival data. Specifically, we investigate the relationship between IT human capital and audit quality and the two mechanisms (i.e. improved efficiency and reduced audit risk) underlying the relationship. We also investigate how this relationship is moderated by features of clients, audit firms and individual auditors. Then we use interviews to corroborate the results of our regression analyses.

Our analyses of archival data show that IT human capital positively affects audit quality through improved efficiency and reduced audit risk and that this positive impact is more pronounced for clients in non-manufacturing industries, those with a more opaque information environment, audit firms with greater industry coverage and individual auditors with less experience. Our interview data indicate that audit firms with more advanced AFI and a higher level of IT human capital in particular are less disrupted by the pandemic and are better able to use IT to address challenges associated with COVID-19. Furthermore, the results confirm that improved efficiency and reduced audit risk are the mechanisms through which AFI enhances audit quality. Finally, we identify issues associated with the use of IT.

This study is the first to investigate how IT human capital (and by extension AFI) influences audit quality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings should be of interest to practitioners and setters of auditing standards.

This study examines the effect of delegation of decision rights, moral justification (MJ), and ethical climate (EC) on managers’ misreporting in the financial services sector. We employed an online research panel called Qualtrics, to collect data based on a sample of 127 middle-level managers from various US financial services firms. We find that MJ mediates the relation between delegation and misreporting, suggesting delegation of decision rights increases employees’ misreporting indirectly by increasing MJ. We also find that EC significantly moderates the relationship between MJ and misreporting. Furthermore, our test of the moderated-mediation effect reveals that the indirect effect of the delegation of decision rights on misreporting through MJ is stronger when there is a higher level of instrumental climate (IC) and a lower level of principle climate (PC).

This paper aims to investigate whether audit partners can signal their audit quality to the market by having, gaining or losing large prestigious audit clients.

A hedonic audit fee model is estimated on a sample of 19.702 firm/years of Australian listed companies for the period 2013–23 with variables added to code for partners who have, gain or lose large clients at various fee thresholds.

Non Big-4 partners who have, gain or lose large clients can earn significant fee premiums from their smaller clients However, there are no significant fee premiums for Big-4 partners. The results for non Big-4 are partially explained by a “trading up” effect.

The results show that audit firms, particularly non Big-4 firms, can market their partners based on the prestigious clients they audit and can earn fee premiums for doing so. They also show that the market values partners who prune their client portfolios.

This paper shows smaller clients can make judgments about audit partner quality based on the ability of partners to attract and retain large clients and willingness to prune their client portfolios and that this will influence their willingness to pay fee premiums to be audited by such partners.

Red Riding Hood is said to have been assembled from folktales that pre-date the collector Charles Perrault's 1697 re-telling and initial publishing (Dundes, 1989; Zipes, 1993). Since then, it is a story that has been re-told and re-imagined many times in various media contexts, with Beckett suggesting that it is one of the most familiar icons of Western culture, and a ‘highly effective intertextual referent’ (Beckett, 2002, p. XVI). Even though this story has been generally regarded as a children's tale, adult themes of sexuality and transgression have been explored in modern re-conceptions. In this chapter, we examine the representation of gender and masculinity in commercial media output: the 2011 American film Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke, 2011) and the pilot episode of the NBC series Grimm (2011). In Red Riding Hood, a romantic horror film, the male characters may be regarded as satellites that cluster around the female protagonist, whereas in Grimm, through its generic fusion of police procedural and horror genres, the text plays upon strong established examples of traditional male roles alongside more nuanced and contemporary representations of masculinity. Our analysis explores themes of transformation and heteronormativity and the extent to which the texts challenge or conform to traditional tellings.

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the determinants of patients' service choices between telephone consultation and text consultation in online health communities (OHCs).

This study utilized an empirical model based on the elaboration likelihood model and examined the effect of information, regarding service quality (the central route) and service price (the peripheral route), using online health consultation data from one of the largest OHCs in China.

The logistic regression results indicated that both physician- and patient-generated information can influence the patients' service choices; service price signals will lead patients to cheaper options. However, individual motivations, disease risk and consulting experience change a patients' information processing regarding central and peripheral cues.

Previous researchers have investigated the mechanism of patient behavior in OHCs; however, the researchers have not focused on the patients' choices regarding the multiple health services provided in OHCs. The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for future researchers, OHC designers and physicians.