State Liability Regimes within the United States and Auditor Reporting
研究了美国各州法律对审计师责任的差异如何影响其出具持续经营审计意见的决策，发现高责任州的审计师更可能对财务困境客户出具修改意见，并利用新泽西和加利福尼亚的自然实验验证了因果关系。
ABSTRACT We examine how state liability regimes within the United States affect auditor reporting decisions. We exploit variation across state-level common law in two aspects of auditor liability: the extent to which auditors can be held liable by third parties for negligence, and rules for apportioning liability across multiple defendants. We find that auditors are more likely to issue a modified going-concern (GC) report to financially distressed clients from high-liability states than to those from low-liability states. We sharpen inferences using a natural experiment that examines the causal effects of two exogenous shocks to auditor third-party liability standards, which dramatically restricted auditors' liability in New Jersey in 1995 and in California in 1992. Results from difference-in-differences tests imply that auditors' propensity to issue a modified opinion for client firms in New Jersey and California decreases significantly after the decline in auditors' litigation exposure, relative to control firms from other jurisdictions. These findings add to our understanding of how litigation risk affects auditor behavior and highlight an important source of variation in litigation risk within the U.S. that has seldom been studied to date.