A Reply: James D. Newton and Robert H. Ashton.
作者回应Cushing对其论文的讨论，认为实证研究不必等待理论成熟，并补充了变量间相关性及审计延迟差异的统计结果。
Abstract In this article, the authors present their opinion on a discussion of their paper "The Association Between Audit Technology and Audit Delay," by Barry E. Cushing. Cushing not only discusses specific aspects of the paper but he offers his own analysis of the association between audit structure and audit delay. The authors do not believe, however, that empirical research should wait until underlying theory in this area is well developed. Concurrent efforts in theoretical de- velopment and empirical analyses would seem to be more productive. On a more technical level, Cushing notes that the authors do not report an intercorrelation matrix for the independent variables nor the results of statistical significance tests on the mean audit delays across firms. On the first issue, only three of the 140 correlations among the independent variables (28 each year times 5 years) are above .20 and the largest is .33. On the second issue, the differences in audit delays across the eight firms are significant at the . 10 level or better for all years except 1979 and 1980, and the differences across the three categories of firms are significant for all years except 1982.