The Effect of Audit Experience on Audit Fees and Audit Quality
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior research on audit experience focuses on behavioral studies that are conducted by running experiments. Although these studies provide evidence on the role of experience in completing specific audit tasks, they do not shed light on how experience affects a complete audit engagement. We conduct an archival study to examine the effect of audit experience on audit fees and audit quality. Using unique data from China, where the signees of the audit report can be identified and linked with a government database containing personal information about certified public accountants, we find that experience is positively associated with audit fees and negatively associated with absolute discretionary accruals. Furthermore, we extend the research on personal characteristics of audit partners by considering the incremental effects of gender, education, engagement tenure, industry specialization, and client importance after controlling for overall audit experience. Overall, our results suggest that the auditors’ personal characteristics may serve as a signal of the level of care that will be exercised during the audit process. Our results also have implications for China’s recently announced regulation that would require localization of Big 4 offices in China.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it