Auditor tenure and audit quality: An empirical study of Chinese listed firms

Abstract

This paper uses the data of A-Share listed firms from CSMAR from 1999 to 2016 as a sample. I investigated whether auditor tenure correlates with audit quality by using earnings management to represent audit quality. The discretionary accruals of John’s Model express the level of earnings management. After calculated the discretionary accruals, I divided earnings management into opportunistic earnings management and informative earnings management. After controlling the size, financial leverage, use of big 4 audit firm, ROA, cash flow, and growth of the firm, this paper concludes that the long-tenured auditor is more likely to have high-quality audit reports, this correlation can be applied to either opportunistic earnings management or informative earnings management.