Does gender and ethnic diversity among audit partners influence office‐level audit personnel retention and audit quality?
基于对美国审计合伙人的访谈和手工收集数据，研究发现办公室审计合伙人的性别和种族多样性越高，审计专业人员流失率越低，审计质量越高，且这一效应通过提高留任率、增强人员多样性等机制部分传导。
Abstract Motivated by prior literature on organizational identification and 23 semistructured interviews with a variety of US audit partners and directors, we examine whether the gender and ethnic diversity of an office's audit partners influences the retention of the office's audit professionals and the quality of the audits conducted by the office. Using hand‐collected data on US audit partners, we find that greater levels of (or changes in) diversity in office audit partners' gender and ethnicity are associated with lower (reduced) turnover among office audit professionals and higher (increased) office‐level audit quality. We conduct a path analysis based on the most common mechanisms highlighted in our interviews to provide further insight into the audit quality results. The results indicate partial mediation through increased retention, greater gender and ethnic diversity among office audit personnel, client continuity, and increased efficiency. Further tests reveal that the association with audit quality is incremental to, and distinct from, the effect of individual engagement partner characteristics and does not reflect client screening. The findings underscore the importance of gender and ethnic diversity among office audit partners to organizational outcomes and provide important practical implications for audit firms.