Ownership structure, fair value measurement and audit fees – empirical evidence from China

Abstract

The Guidelines on Professional Ethics for Chinese Certified Public Accountants, which came into effect on 1 January 2007, set out the principles of audit fees. Due to the long time and the lack of standardisation, private enterprises purchase audit opinions, and accounting firms increase audit costs to obtain high profits, leading to confusion in the audit fee market. Therefore, this paper studies audit fees. The results show that there is a significant inverse variation relationship between managerial ownership and audit fees, while ownership concentration, equity restriction and the rate of change in assets measured at fair value are positively related to audit fees.