Auditor Fees, Market Microstructure, and Firm Transparency
检验审计师是否将公司不透明风险定价在审计费用中，发现审计费用与市场不透明指标正相关，支持风险定价假说。
Abstract: Auditors, as corporate insiders, have access to private information regarding the firm's financial and business opacity that is unavailable to outside investors. We test whether auditors price their knowledge of firm opacity in their audit fees by examining two competing hypotheses. The first states that higher audit fees may reflect the greater risk that the auditor faces in auditing an opaque firm. Under this hypothesis, market based measures of opacity will be positively correlated with higher fees. The second hypothesis states that firms buy reputational capital from their auditor by paying high fees in an attempt to improve the market's perception of the firm's transparency. In this case, higher audit fees are negatively correlated with market based measures of opacity. Our results are consistent with the first hypothesis, that auditors price opacity risk into their fees.