Opinion-shopping: firm versus partner-level evidence
利用西班牙公司长期数据，研究发现公司通过更换审计师成功进行意见购买，但在合伙人层面未发现成功证据，表明审计市场特征在公司与合伙人层面存在差异。
Employing Lennox’s (2000 Lennox, C.S, 2000. Do companies successfully engage in opinion-shopping? evidence from the UK. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 29, 321–337.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) methodology on a uniquely long time series of Spanish companies’ data, we find evidence of successful audit opinion-shopping through the firm switching decision. However, in contrast to Chen et al. (2016 Chen, F., Peng, S., Xue, S., Yang, Z., and Ye, F, 2016. Do audit clients successfully engage in opinion-shopping? Partner-level Evidence. Journal of Accounting Research, 54 (1), 79–112.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in the Chinese setting, we find no evidence of successful opinion-shopping at the partner level. This supports the thesis that the audit market characteristics that are key to promote or deter opinion shopping might differ at the firm and partner level within a country, with consequences for audit quality. In addition, we provide evidence on the strategies that companies use to secure more favourable opinions. The results suggest that companies may prefer to opinion shop at the partner level, which is consistent with the argument that the costs and benefits associated with opinion-shopping are different at these two levels, and lead to different outcomes.