A Theory of Auditor Resignation
提出审计师从高风险客户辞职的经济学解释，分析为何审计师不通过风险调整定价而选择辞职，以及继任审计师为何能接受被拒绝的客户。
In this paper we propose an economic rationale for auditors resigning from the engagements of risky clients and use this rationale to examine claims that increases in expected auditor liability are giving rise to an increase in auditor resignations.1 Given the relatively inelastic demand by publicly traded firms for audits, it seems puzzling that auditors would resign rather than simply risk-adjust their bids for the increase in expected liability. In addition, it is not clear why a successor auditor, who faces not only the threat of legal liability but also the information disadvantage accompanying a first-year audit, would accept the rejected client. Our theory explains how an incumbent auditor rationally resigns an engagement because any attempt at risk-adjusted pricing leaves him with only unprofitable clients, and how successor auditors who know less about the client than the incumbent auditor can profitably accept the engagement of a client whose auditor has rationally resigned. Several auditing models have specifically addressed why client firms switch auditors (Magee and Tseng [1990], Dye [1991], Teoh [1992], Kanodia and Mukherji [1994], and Gigler and Penno [1995]). The interest in auditor switches arises partly from regulatory concerns that