Search results

There has been growing concern worldwide regarding audit quality in Japan after the Kanebo and Olympus accounting scandals. The purpose of this paper is to examine the Japanese audit market from 2001 to 2011 to determine whether audit quality differs between Big N and Non-Big N audit firms and whether this difference, if existed, changed during 2007 when the number of big audit firms declined from four to three and the requirements of audit quality became more rigorous.

This study employs a sample of Japanese listed firms from fiscal year 2001 to 2011. Five proxy variables for audit quality are used and the data are analyzed using the propensity score matching method.

The authors show that irrespective of their size, all audit firms in Japan provide the same quality of service, when controlling for client characteristics including keiretsu, foreign sales ratio and bankruptcy risk measured in Japan. Additionally, the results suggest that although only three major audit firms remain in the Japanese audit market after the dissolution of PricewaterhouseCooper’s Chuo-Aoyama firm in 2007, the audit quality difference between Big N and Non-Big N remained unchanged before and after 2007.

The study contributes to the lack of existing empirical evidence on audit quality in Japan, a country characterized with low audit litigation risk and more emphasis on auditor reputation, given the influence of the notable change in Japanese audit market competition from Big 4 to Big 3. The study’s research design contributes to the extant literature by using multiple proxies of audit quality.

The Accounting Standards Board of Japan (ASBJ) proposed a new set of endorsed International Financial Reporting Standards in June 2015. ASBJ claims that non-recycling of other comprehensive income (OCI) items decreases the information usefulness of earnings in a proposed comprehensive income standard. There has been no existing empirical evidence which supports the ASBJ’s statement and the purpose of the study is to test whether OCI recycling improves information usefulness of net income from six perspectives: relative and incremental value relevance, persistence, variability, operating cash flow and net income predictive power.

This paper is an empirical work using a listed Japanese firms sample of 5,385 firm-years from fiscal year 2012-2014.

The results challenge the ASBJ’s claim that recycling improves the general information usefulness characteristics of net income. The empirical results show that OCI recycling improves net income’s relative value relevance characteristic of financial firms. However, recycling information by itself does not improve the incremental value relevance, and the predictive power of operating cash flow and net income. The authors also find that the inclusion of recycling decreases the persistence and increases the variability of net income.

This paper has two research limitations. First, this study is constrained to analyze a limited OCI recycling data that is recently disclosed by listed Japanese firms. Second, the results of this study have limited external validity to capital markets with OCI reclassification standards that deviate from Japanese GAAP.

This study provides initial empirical evidence that examines information usefulness of OCI recycling in Japan. The findings of this study are relevant for accounting standards setters aiming to increase the information usefulness of earnings for capital market investors.

The Chinese data setting allows researchers to explore the influence of local versus national (central) government ownership on companies. This study aims to examine the influence of government ownership (local versus national) and auditor choice (choosing larger or smaller firms) on audit pricing in China.

This study executed three panel data regressions to examine the two hypotheses using 19,626 observations from 2009 to 2017 in the Chinese data setting. This study also uses the Sobel test to investigate the moderating effect of auditor choice.

This study first examines whether choosing a large audit firm positively influences audit pricing and whether listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) charge less audit fees to audit firms after controlling for various variables. However, the interaction influence of government ownership and audit firm size on audit pricing is positive, suggesting that a large audit firm charges a client company more, even if the client is an SOE. More importantly, when we divide SOEs into national- and local-SOEs, the results of the influence of auditor choice, government ownership and the interaction of government ownership on audit pricing are consistent (plus, minus, plus), and audit firms charge local-SOEs less than national-SOEs. Furthermore, from the additional analysis, this study finds that the strong auditor type has a moderate effect on the case of local-SOEs on audit pricing and local-SOEs choose smaller auditors.

Research on the differences between local and national government ownership is limited. This study adds empirical results from this perspective. In particular, the findings suggest a further audit pricing research direction to consider the influence of client companies’ ownership types and auditor choice, especially in countries with planned economies.