Further Evidence on the Effect of Regulation on the Exit of Small Auditors from the Audit Market and Resulting Audit Quality
验证SOX法案和PCAOB检查是否通过促使低质量小审计师退出市场来提高审计质量，但未发现退出者质量低于未退出者。
SUMMARY Following the introduction of SOX in 2002 and the introduction of PCAOB inspections starting from 2003, DeFond and Lennox (2011) found that a large number of small auditors exited the SEC client audit market during the 2002–2004 period and that these exiting auditors were of lower quality relative to non-exiting auditors. This paper seeks to verify whether SOX and the introduction of PCAOB inspections improved audit quality through incentivizing small auditors providing lower audit quality to exit the market. Using client discretionary accruals and the likelihood of the clients restating financial statements as proxies for audit quality, we do not find that the small auditors that exited the market for SEC client audits were of lower quality than successor small audit firms that did not exit the market. JEL Classifications: G18; L51. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.