Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

DOI

10.19030/jabr.v31i4.9299

Publication Title

Journal of Applied Business Research

Volume

31

Issue

4

Pages

1245-1266

Abstract

This study examines whether the stock market returns surrounding announcements of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are higher for acquiring firms audited by industry specialists. External auditors are uniquely positioned to provide assurance on the financial statements of their acquiring clients both before and after an acquisition. Also, an important aspect of due diligence in M&A transactions is the external auditors review of the accounting records, financial statements, internal controls and information systems of the target company. Using a sample of 4,283 M&A announcements between 1988 and 2011 in the United States of America, we report the results from our main regressions, controlling for all the bidder traits and deal characteristics. We examine incremental effect of audit firm specialization on cumulative abnormal returns. We also measure the effect of audit firm industry specialization in a reduced sample of 3,946 acquisitions after removing all non-Big N auditors. We use Heckmans (1979) two-step procedure to ensure that announcement period return to the size of the audit firm is not driven by the determinants related to auditor choice. Consistent with the idea that industry specialists provide higher quality assurance and possibly superior M&A advisory services, we find that the stock market returns are higher when acquiring firms are audited by industry specialists.

Comments

"We use the Creative Commons copyright license policy, CC-BY 3.0 US, to maximize the exposure of published manuscripts and remove access and reuse barriers. CC-BY 3.0 gives researchers the right to copy, share, copy, edit, transform, extend, or republish provided that appropriate credit is given."

Original Publication Citation

Lee, H.-Y., Mande, V., & Park, J. C. (2015). Do industry specialist auditors add value in mergers and acquisitions? Journal of Applied Business Research, 31(4), 1245. doi:10.19030/jabr.v31i4.9299

Download

Share

COinS