Audit - Publications - Faculty & Research

TeachingInterests

Audit Committees in a New Era of Governance

The last ten years has heightened demands on audit committees. Not only are they responsible for overseeing internal and external audits to ensure that investors receive accurate and transparent information, but they must ensure compliance with new accounting and... View Details

04 Feb 2013
Research & Ideas

Are the Big Four Audit Firms Too Big to Fail?

Are auditors becoming too big to fail? For over a decade, there have been articles and op-eds in the popular and business press arguing that the auditing industry, currently dominated by Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Accounting

22 Apr 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Audit Quality and Auditor Reputation: Evidence from Japan

Keywords: by Douglas J. Skinner & Suraj Srinivasan

16 Apr 2013
Working Paper Summaries

The Auditing Oligopoly and Lobbying on Accounting Standards

Keywords: by Abigail M. Allen, Karthik Ramanna & Sugata Roychowdhury; Accounting; Banking

June 2009
Case

The Role of the Audit Committee in Risk Oversight

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Kaitlyn Simpson

An audit committee chair considers how he can help his committee become more effective given the increasing regulatory demands on audit committees. He also wrestles with the lack of specificity in audit committee duties and whether his committee should take on... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Corporate Governance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Laws and Statutes; Risk Management

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May 2020
Article

Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data

By: Achal Bassamboo, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos

Spoilage, expiration, damage due to employee/customer handling, employee theft, and customer shoplifting usually are not reflected in inventory records. As a result, records often report phantom inventory, i.e., units of good not available for sale. We derive an... View Details

Keywords: Shelf Availability; Inventory Record Inaccuracy; Optimal Replenishment; Retail Analytics; Performance Effectiveness; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

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November 2011
Background Note

Auditing in the Post-Sarbanes-Oxley World

By: Anette Mikes, Gwen Yu and Dominique Hamel

Keywords: Accounting Audits

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2023
Working Paper

Much Ado About Nothing? Overreaction to Random Regulatory Audits

By: Samuel Antill and Joseph Kalmenovitz

Regulators often audit firms to detect non-compliance. Exploiting a natural experiment in the lobbying industry, we show that firms overreact to audits and this response distorts prices and reduces welfare. Each year, federal regulators audit a random sample of... View Details

Keywords: Governance Compliance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Price

Citation

SSRN

1983
Chapter

Statistical Methods for Auditing and Accounting

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Keywords: Accounting; Accounting Audits; Mathematical Methods

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Article

Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness

By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu

The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning are statistical definitions: they fix a small collection of pre-defined groups, and then ask for parity of some statistic of the classifier (like classification rate or false positive rate) across these groups.... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Fairness; Mathematical Methods

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07 Jan 2013
News

SEC probes Ernst & Young over audit client lobbying

2013
Working Paper

The Auditing Oligopoly and Lobbying on Accounting Standards

By: Abigail M. Allen, Karthik Ramanna and Sugata Roychowdhury

We examine how the tightening of the U.S. auditing oligopoly over the last twenty-five years—from the Big 8 to the Big 6, the Big 5, and, then, the Big 4—has affected the incentives of the Big N, as manifest in their lobbying preferences on accounting standards. We... View Details

Keywords: Standards; Accounting Audits; Accounting Industry; United States

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SSRN

04 Feb 2013
News

Are the ‘Big Four’ Audit Firms Too Big to Fail?

October 1990 (Revised January 1992)
Case

Marriott Corp.: The Internal Audit Function

By: Robert L. Simons

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Accommodations Industry

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13 May 2002
Op-Ed

A Cure for Enron-Style Audit Failures

If companies and regulators are ever to learn from the collapse of Enron—and prevent similar corporate debacles in the future—they must look more closely at the relationship between auditors, managers and the company audit committee. The... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Lorsch; Accounting