Executives’ facial attractiveness and audit fees
研究发现，CFO面部吸引力越高的公司，审计费用越低，这可能是因为吸引力促进了审计师与客户之间的软信息交流，降低了审计风险判断。
We examine whether Chief Financial Officers’ (CFOs) facial attractiveness influences audit pricing in a setting where independence, objectivity, and professional skepticism are expected to dominate decision-making. Using a machine-learning-based measure of facial attractiveness validated against human ratings, we analyze CFOs of U.S. publicly listed firms from 2006 to 2016 and find that auditors charge significantly lower audit fees to firms with more facially attractive CFOs. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that facial attractiveness facilitates closer engagement and richer exchange of soft information, especially during periods of high uncertainty, and that attractiveness exerts greater influence when relationship-specific information is limited, which leads auditors to lower their assessed audit risk and charge lower audit fees. Additional tests show that CFO attractiveness is unrelated to financial reporting quality, the likelihood of going concern opinions, or financial restatements, suggesting that facial attractiveness is not a proxy for firm fundamentals or CFO competence. Overall, our study introduces a novel channel – appearance-driven dynamics in auditor–client interactions – which extends prior research on behavioural influences in audit pricing.