The Empirical Research On Auditor Reputation In The Auditing Market Of China

In recent years, a series of significant accountant fraudulent case have appeared consecutively at home and abroad and the investor heavy lost. Be to be used for out investment decision coming the financial report being dependent on what certified public accountant audits since these investors are main, therefore, they impute very big parts of responsibility to certified public accountant , leading to the audit industry having produced grave credit crisis. Owing to the product of audit having the characteristic of the trusting product and the common product, the regulation authority restrain the public accountant's behavior by making audit regulations and pertinent laws and statutes to provide the forceful guarantee for the society. But these regulatory systems can not stimulate an accounting firm to provide higher quality of the audit service since the audit service has inherent moral hazard of product problem. Therefore, the accounting firms have intense motivation to separate audit service from others for avoiding price competition. Since the deal between the accounting firm and the consumer is that one kind of many periods'repetitiveness games, the accounting firm has sufficient driving force and pressure to put different strategies into practice right away for avoiding price competition and realizing maximum profit. But advertisement is to be restricted in many countries for the accounting firm, so the accounting firm separates the audit service from others by building up brand reputation.To the reputation of the accounting firm, the overseas research has already got pretty rich achievement. The overseas researchers mainly engage in the effect of audit reputation by the empirical research. To the provider, building up and maintaining the audit reputation can bring additional income and economy of scale and reduce the audit risk. To the investor, the audit reputation can reduce the searching cost and cut down the loss from investment decision failure. To a listed company's administering authority, the audit reputation can reduce the down degree of the stock price in Initial Public Offers market and transferring the information that they anticipate future cash flow. In the homeland, because our country's audits marketplace built before long and audit reputation did not exist nearly, the literature on audit reputation was comparatively few in the past. In recent years, somebody began to pay attention to the research on the audit reputation because of the recent financial fraudulent law case and the honesty of audit industry being questioned by society. But audit reputation is one kind of sincere behavior, so we can build up audit reputation mechanism to remove the misgivings of the public. Currently, a great many literatures on audit reputation spring up, but more literature research on how to build up the audit mechanism and maintain the audit mechanism by the theoretical research. Li tiao and Li Lianjun have testified that the first several important accounting firms in the homeland have had audit reputation first. It can help to improve the public's hope to a degree. But it is worth that discusses more if these accounting firms continue having reputation and if these accounting firms have countrywide reputation being worth it further under the peculiar audit system of our country background. This paper researches on the audit reputation from this aspect.In this paper, we consider that the independent audit reputation is which the individual who engages in audit industry and the accounting firm insist on the principle of independence ,impersonality and justness and announce the audit opinion strictly by the independent audit regulations and being praised by the public for a long time. The independent audit reputation can be divided the certified public accountant individual reputation, the accounting firm reputation and the certified public accountant industrial association reputation mark by the object of the main body of reputation. Relative to certified public accountant individual reputation and industrial association reputation, reputation of the accounting firm has embodied both entire industry reputations concretely and having included personal reputation of certified public accountant. So, we concentrate on discussing reputation of the accounting firm. We analyses the relation between audit reputation and audit quality by the information asymmetry theory, the signal theory and the reputation of the organizes theory. The result indicates an accounting firm reputation can transfer the audit quality as one kind of signal mechanism and it can help to remove the information asymmetry phenomenon in the audit marketplace.Besides, we consider that the prerequisite that the accounting firm maintains the long-term reputation is that the discount value of the monetary reward of the audit quality is higher than the cost of the investment of reputation.According to the above theoretical analysis, we bring forward the hypothesis combining with our country peculiar system background:H1:The auditing charge of the accounting firms which have high reputation is higher than the accounting firms which have no reputation.H2:The auditing charge of the accounting firms which have countryside reputation is higher than other accounting firms.H3:The auditing charge of the accounting firms which have local reputation is higher than the accounting firms which have no reputation in the local marketplace, but the auditing charge in other place is not notable.We use the data of listed companies in stock market of share A in China. According to Simunic's multivariate return models and under the condition of the size of the customer of accounting firm, the complicacy of the customer's business, the risk of the customer's audit and in the region which the customer lie to, we test the hypothesis. The result is as follows: the audit quality which the domestic Big 5 provide is higher than the domestic other accounting firms; the domestic Big 5 have the reputation in the other place first and it indicates that we have the countryside reputation's accounting firms in the domestic auditing market, but the reputation is much weak, we hope we can continue to have research on that.