Did the 1998 Merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand Increase Audit Quality?
研究了1998年普华永道与永道合并后，合并事务所的审计质量在事务所整体和分所层面是否提升，发现整体上审计质量提高，且主要由重叠分所驱动。
Abstract We examine the effects of the 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse ( PW ) and Coopers & Lybrand ( CL ) on the audit quality of the merged firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) at both the firm and office levels, where audit quality is surrogated by the auditor's propensity to issue a going‐concern opinion, clients’ likelihood of meeting or beating analysts’ earnings forecasts, and clients’ accrual quality. At the firm level, we find that the merger increased audit quality for PwC relative to the audit quality of the other Big N firms. At the office level, our findings, albeit mixed, collectively suggest that the improvement in firm‐level audit quality was likely driven by the improvement in audit quality at PwC's overlapping offices, that is, offices in cities where both PW and CL had separate offices prior to the merger. Further, our findings suggest that although the PW / CL merger increased auditor concentration in local audit markets with PwC overlapping offices, the merger improved (rather than hurt) audit quality in those markets. Overall, our study contributes to the extant sparse literature on the effect of Big N mergers on audit quality, and is of potential interest to regulators.