Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how auditors would react when there are exogenous negative shocks to their client portfolios. Design/methodology/approach Using a sample of 31,256 firm-year observations (2001–2016), the authors investigate whether industry shocks to a subset of an auditor’s clients distract the auditor and affect the professional skepticism applied in the audits of other clients. Findings The authors find that clients of distracted auditors are more likely to meet or beat analyst consensus forecasts, suggesting that auditors’ professional skepticism is compromised by distractive events. The cross-sectional analyses reveal that the negative impact of the distractive events on audit quality is more pronounced when the distracted auditors audit less important clients, face lower third-party legal liabilities and experience higher growth. Using an alternative measure of audit quality, the additional analysis shows that clients of distracted auditors exhibit a higher probability of restating their earnings in subsequent years. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that when distracted, auditors render lower quality audit. Originality/value The study complements recent work by Cassell et al. (2019), which shows that the 2008–2009 financial crisis affected the quality of the audits of nonbank clients of bank-specialized auditors. While Cassell et al. (2019) focus on one shock (financial crisis) to one industry (i.e. the financial services industry), the study examines more frequent shocks over a wide range of industries to identify the potential effects of distractive events, improving the generalizability of the findings to all industries and all auditors (specialist and nonspecialist) in nonrecession periods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".