Audit Office's unused capacity and audit quality

Abstract

While prior studies have linked the relationship between resources, time pressure, and audit quality, prior empirical studies generally measure the notion of audit offices' resources or capacity in relatively simplified, indirect, or context-specific ways. In this study, we use two measures of an audit office's unused capacity pertaining to normal audit tasks in Yu (2018) to examine their associations with several proxies for audit quality (discretionary accruals, earnings benchmarks, and going concern audit opinions). Empirical results show some evidence that higher (lower) unused capacity can result in better (worse) audit quality; and if any, this seems to occur only in Big 4 audit offices.