Client-based measure of the audit office reputation

Abstract

Following the findings from marketing and management literature on corporate reputation, we develop a new proxy to measure the audit office reputation. We argue that the presence of reputable clients and their tenure with the audit office is an unbiased and strong testimony for audit office reputation. For a sample of 3,233 audit firm clients we find that our measure of audit office reputation is positively associated with audit fees and audit quality. We also show that the earnings of clients from audit offices with higher CBAR are valued higher, suggesting that the market perceives the reputation of such offices to be higher and the earnings of their clients to be more credible. This research is important since CBAR is a new and readily available measure of audit office quality that provides incremental explanatory power for audit fees and audit quality beyond previously available measures.