Browsing by Author "Davidson, Robert H."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Audit Office Closure Risk and Audit Outcomes
    DiYorio, Jonathan Gabriel (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-01)
    This study aims to better understand factors associated with audit office closures and how the risk of office closure relates to audit outcomes, including audit quality and fees. Factors associated with office closure include small office size, lower office growth, proximity to regulators, unfavorable local economic changes, client losses, and lack of recent local office closures. The main analysis does not find evidence of a relationship between closure risk and audit quality but suggests that offices with a higher closure risk charge higher audit fees per client compared to offices with lower closure risk. Results also suggest that clients who change audit firms following closure of their auditor's office enjoy higher quality and lower fees compared to those clients who change offices but remain with the same firm following closure. These audit quality results cannot be explained by clients switching to Big 4 auditors, industry specialists, or to more geographically proximate offices. Instead, these results suggest a fresh look benefit by the new audit firm. Additionally, the audit fee discount enjoyed by these clients diminishes over time as the fees for these clients increase more quickly than for those clients that change offices following closure.
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    Competition, Cost Analytics, and Offsetting Strategies: Pressures and Opportunities on the Fraud Triangle
    Du Pon, Adam Watanabe (Virginia Tech, 2021-04-05)
    This study introduces industry competition factors to fraud models to examine how competition associates with fraud risk. I argue that industry competition eclipses many firm-level determinants in their association with fraud risk, and that the cost of poor information elevates fraud risk as competition increases. I find that fraud risk is higher for firms in industries with 1) more substitutable products and services, 2) greater threats of new entry, and 3) larger incumbent pools of competitors, and that substitution exceeds every firm-level variable except size in its relevance with fraud risk. Cross-sectionally, I provide evidence that industry-wide non-adoption of advanced cost analytics (i.e. using obsolete, distortionary standard costing practices) may exacerbate the fraud-risk effects of competition, especially product substitution: a one standard deviation increase in substitution associates with over double the fraud risk for firms in industries typified by obsolete costing practices. I also find that different strategies vary in their fraud-offsetting associations dependent on the type of competition most prevalent in an industry. Together, these findings shed light on how the effects of industry competition may subsume or surpass most firm-level fraud determinants and provide evidence of previously unidentified drawbacks of obsolete cost accounting systems.
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    "Do as I Say, Not as I Do": Audit Firm Leadership and Engagement-Level Risk
    Valentine, Delia Fidelas (Virginia Tech, 2022-04-12)
    This study examines the "off-the-job" behavior of individuals in office-level leadership positions across the Big 4 audit firms in the U.S. In their leadership role, the managing partner is responsible for setting the tone at the top of an office through formal communication of firm-wide policies and an informal example through their behavior and preferences. Given this role, I predict that engagements conducted within offices led by individuals who are willing to break the rules will exhibit characteristics synonymous with increased audit risks. Relying on their history of legal infractions to identify rule-breaking behavior, I find managing partners with prior infractions are associated with engagements that reflect increased misstatement risk and detection risk (i.e., lower auditor effort). Additional tests reveal that the results are concentrated in offices that are located further away from alternative governance mechanisms within the same audit firm. Importantly, after controlling for the risk of misstatement, I find the pricing of misstatement risk declines significantly on engagements in offices with infraction managing partners. The results are robust to alternative measures of managing partners' prior infractions and the use of entropy balancing techniques, along with several other robustness tests. Collectively, my study contributes to our limited knowledge of the quality control structures in place at large audit firms and provides a potential mechanism for tone at the Big 4 audit firms to vary across offices.
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    The Effects of Core Audit Teams' Review of Centralized Audit Teams' Work
    Wolfe, Karneisha Tiye (Virginia Tech, 2023-10-18)
    The large accounting firms recently created U.S.-based audit support groups to advance efficiency and consistency by applying firm-wide methodologies and standard audit procedures in judgmental/routine accounting areas. These groups—hereafter called the centralized audit team (CAT)—service several engagements simultaneously and execute procedures independently without core teams' oversight. However, the core teams are required to review and finalize the CAT's completed assessments and audit conclusions. This authority can result in unintended consequences, such as the core team discounting the results of the CAT's testing, which can reduce consistency across engagements. I investigate this concern by conducting an experiment to examine if the core team's review of the procedures used by the CAT and the client's views about the CAT's evidence requests influence core team reviewers' evaluations of the CAT's work. I predict and find that dissimilarities between the nature and extent of audit procedures used by core teams in prior audits and those currently used by CATs create an association effect such that reviewers are more likely to disagree with the CAT's conclusions. Inconsistent with my prediction that core teams will feel the need to please their clients, I find marginal evidence that reviewers are more likely to agree with the CAT's conclusions when clients complain versus when clients do not complain about CATs' excessive evidence requests. I fail to find evidence of an interaction effect. This study contributes to existing research and practice by highlighting conditions that can affect firms' ability to obtain their anticipated consistency and efficiency goals because core teams may discount the CAT's audit approach.
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    Institutional Investor Cliques Information Dissemination, and the Value of Information: Evidence from Insider Trading
    Zhang, Zhenyu (Virginia Tech, 2023-04-19)
    I analyze the relationship between insider trading outcomes and insiders' information environment within a network. While most existing studies rely on one dimension of commonality (e.g., personal ties, professional ties, geographic proximity) to construct the social network, I document the formation of the institutional investor groups (cliques) that exogenously connect firm-level insiders within the social network. Using difference-in-differences designs examining changes in clique size, I provide empirical evidence on the information dissemination channels within a network in which its members are quasi-randomly selected. Insider transactions in larger cliques exhibit lower abnormal trading profits, higher level of trading frequency, and larger amount of trade size, suggesting information dissemination is increasing in clique size. Then, I provide empirical evidence that the association between the value of information and the information dissemination rate is monotonic, consistent with prior theoretical studies.
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    Is Corporate Taxation Bad for the Environment? An Empirical Analysis of the Association between State-Level Taxation and Corporate Environmental Performance
    Meersman, James Elliot (Virginia Tech, 2024-07-09)
    I investigate the impact of statutory tax rates on U.S. firms' environmental performance. Prior literature emphasizes the effect of manager influence on the relation between tax avoidance and environmental activities. However, it is unclear how taxes imposed on a firm impact environmental performance. Firms subject to higher statutory tax rates experience more restricted cash flows. As such, higher statutory tax rates may limit managers' ability to address environmental concerns. Firms that experience higher statutory tax rates may not prioritize environmental efforts, which are often non-essential to a firm's operations, despite government incentives. Alternatively, higher tax rates may encourage firms to address environmental concerns due to the tax shield that these expenses provide and the relatively lower cost to shareholders. Observing tax rate variation at the state level, I find higher state tax rates are associated with weaker environmental performance. My study contributes to regulators' understanding of the interaction between tax policy and firms' abilities to address their environmental impact.
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    Two Essays on Capital Structure Decisions of the Firm: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Managerial Entrenchment and Ethical Corporate Citizenship
    Ampofo, Akwasi Amankwaah (Virginia Tech, 2021-04-27)
    This dissertation consists of two essays on the impact of managerial entrenchment and ethical corporate citizenship on capital structure decisions of the firm. The first essay examines the impact of managerial entrenchment on financial flexibility and capital structure decisions of firms. Agency conflicts and asymmetric information between managers and shareholders of firms exacerbate managerial entrenchment, which is operationalized using the entrenchment index. The excess cash ratio of a firm over the median cash ratio of firms within the same 3 digits SIC code is the proxy for financial flexibility. Capital structure decisions include the extent and maturity of debt as proxied by debt-to-equity ratio, and average debt maturity respectively. Results indicate that compared to managers who are not entrenched, entrenched managers obtain less rather than more debt, and they use long-term rather than short-term debt maturity. Also, entrenched managers keep more excess cash than managers who are not entrenched. This is especially the case for firms in small and large market value groups compared to medium sized firms. Results do not change before, during, and after the 2008 global economic crisis. The second essay examines the impact of ethical corporate citizenship and CEO power on cost of capital, and firm value in the context of stakeholder theory. Firms listed as World's Most Ethical Companies (WMECs) exemplify ethical corporate citizenship, which is operationalized as a binary variable of 1 for WMECs, and zero for non-WMECs. This paper matches WMECs and non-WMECs control firms in the same 3 digits SIC code, and within 10 percent of total assets. CEO power is primarily measured using CEO pay slice calculated as CEO total compensation as a percentage of top 5 executives of the firm. Powerful CEOs have pay slice above the 50th percentile, and weak CEOs pay slice is below the 50th percentile. Tobin's q is the proxy for firm value, and cost of capital is measured as the market value weighted cost of debt, and cost of equity. Results indicate that WMECs have neither lower cost of capital nor higher Tobin's q than matched control sample of non-WMECs. Firms led by powerful CEOs have significantly lower cost of debt capital, and lower industry-adjusted Tobin's q than firms led by weak CEOs. The negative impact of CEO power on firm value is consistent with agency theory that self-interested CEOs extract firm value for personal advantage, subject to managerial controls. Results have implications for research and practice in capital structure, corporate governance, CEO compensation, and corporate social responsibility.