Study On The Correlation Between Executive Characteristics And Audit Fees

In this paper,we use the data of Chinese A share listed companies in 2013-2016 years to explore the impact of top management team characteristics on audit fees.Hambrick and Mason(1984)proposed a higher-order theory to understand the executive team from three aspects,including executive team composition,team structure refers and team process.Scholars also enrich the upper-echelons theory,from the initial population background characteristics to expand the incentive characteristics and governance characteristics.They also discussed the heterogeneity of team characteristics,the top management team characteristics including homogeneity(mean age,sex ratio,education,average tenure,salary incentive,overconfidence,firm background,political background,shareholding ratio etc)and heterogeneity(age heterogeneity,gender heterogeneity,education heterogeneity,tenure heterogeneity,salary heterogeneity).The difference of management team characteristics will affect their personality,thinking,values and choices,and their impact on the company's decision-making and control of the environment and management requirements,their risk tolerance,and firm communication bargaining power will affect the audit pricing.At present,the literature about the impact of top management team characteristics on audit fees is mainly from a single feature.Therefore,on the basis of the previous research results,this paper systematically studies the impact of executive team characteristics on audit fees.The results show that: the average age,the proportion of women executives,compensation incentive and audit fees are positively correlated with audit fees,executive tenure is negatively with audit fees;In TMT heterogeneity index,executive compensation heterogeneity,gender heterogeneity is positively correlated with audit fees,executive tenure heterogeneity is negatively with audit fees.