Gender Diversity and Audit Quality: Evidence from the Pairing of Audit Partners
利用中国审计业务由两位合伙人共同负责的制度，研究发现性别混合的合伙人配对比同性别配对更能提升审计质量，且该效应在合伙人资历相近或客户业务复杂时更显著，主要源于视角拓宽而非人力资本因素。
SUMMARY Using the Chinese setting where two partners are assigned to lead each engagement, we find that gender-diverse partner pairs improve audit quality compared to same-gender partner pairs. We show that the positive effect of partner gender diversity is concentrated in the engagements led by two partners with similar seniority or collaborating as signatory partners for an engagement before or in clients with complex operations. We evaluate two potential factors that could drive the positive effect of partner gender diversity, namely, the perspective-broadening and the human capital factors, and show that perspective-broadening prevails, whereas the human capital factor does not. Our results are robust to controlling for endogeneity and using alternative measures of audit quality. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: M42; M14; M41.