Audit Firm Appointments, Audit Firm Alumni, and Audit Committee Independence*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A company officer is an "alumnus" if he previously worked for an audit firm. Iyer, Bamber, and Barefield (1997) find that alumni have ties with their former audit firms and alumni are more inclined to provide economic benefits to former firms if they have stronger ties. If the alumnus is a senior corporate officer, the alumnus may benefit his former firm by recommending that the company appoint the firm as its auditor. However, the company's audit committee may be concerned that officer-auditor ties threaten audit quality. Therefore, an independent audit committee may not sanction the appointment of the officer's former firm. This study investigates (a) whether companies tend to appoint officers' former audit firms, and (b) whether independent audit committees mitigate this tendency. We document that companies appoint officers' former firms more often than they appoint alternative audit firms. However, companies are less likely to appoint officers' former firms if audit committees are more independent. This suggests that independent audit committees strengthen audit quality by deterring affiliations between audit firms and officers. © CAAA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".