The Estimated Propensity to Issue Going Concern Audit Reports and Audit Quality
研究了审计师出具持续经营审计意见的倾向能否作为审计质量的代理变量，发现不同样本和模型会得出不同结论，提醒不应直接使用该倾向衡量审计质量。
Auditors’ propensity to issue Going Concern Audit Reports (GCARs) is one of the proxies often used for audit quality. Although this propensity is a distinguishing characteristic of auditors, it does not indicate quality according to both theory and practice. In theory, higher quality auditors make fewer audit errors; they are more likely to issue GCARs to clients that deserve them and less likely to issue GCARs to clients that do not. Therefore, the propensity itself does not indicate quality. In practice, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection reports reveal that the GCAR is rarely mentioned as a deficiency, and in the few cases in which it is discussed, the deficiency is attributed to evidence gathering and estimations, rather than to the GCAR decision itself. The theory and practice motivate our study. This article investigates the empirical ability of the GCAR propensity to proxy for audit quality and finds that different samples and different models yield different determinations of auditor quality. Our findings caution against the use of the propensity to issue GCARs as a proxy for audit quality.