Maarten Corten

The demand for auditor services in wholly family-owned private firms: the moderating role of generation

Former audit demand studies generally consider wholly family-owned private firms as a homogeneous group of firms that incur minimal agency costs. Family firm literature, however, argues that these firms might incur significant agency costs as well and we therefore examine audit demand in this particular type of firm. As we examine private family firms from the USA, which have no audit requirement, we broaden the concept of audit demand to the demand for auditor services, which encompasses audits, reviews and compilations. Consistent with former audit demand studies, we hypothesise a negative association between management ownership and the demand for auditor services, but only for first-generation private family firms. We hypothesise that this relation turns positive for subsequent generation private family firms due to entrenching behaviour caused by weakened altruistic feelings between the family shareholders. Our results support this hypothesis, but only regarding the demand for reviews and compilations. Therefore, our findings suggest that reviews and compilations seem to be sufficient and more cost-effective in this specific context to mitigate shareholder–manager agency costs compared to more expensive audits. Moreover, results suggest that the level of shareholder–debtholder agency costs do seem to be a driver for the demand for audits.

Auditor choice in private firms: a stakeholders perspective

This paper aims to examine whether a private firm’s demand for a Big4 auditor is influenced by the auditor choice of its main supplier, customer and competitor. The authors rely on institutional theory to explain this stakeholders’ influence. The authors also examine whether the extent to which the firm’s board of directors engages in networking moderates this influence.,Questionnaire data are combined with archival data of 210 Belgian private firms with a statutory audit requirement. Logistic regression analysis is applied to examine to what extent firms follow their main competitor, customer and supplier in hiring a Big4 auditor.,The results reveal a positive association between the firm’s choice of a Big4 auditor and its main supplier being audited by a Big4 auditor, supporting the conformance effect (isomorphism) toward suppliers as hypothesized by institutional theory. The extent of board networking, however, seems to weaken this effect. Toward competitors, a divergence effect instead of a conformance effect is found, which indicates the existence of competitive differentiation regarding auditor choice.,While prior studies mainly focus on the agency relationships between shareholders, debtholders and managers to explain auditor choice, this study also takes into account the firm’s other main stakeholders by relying on institutional theory. Both the conformance effect toward suppliers as well as the divergence effect toward competitors provide interesting additional perspectives on why auditors are demanded, leading to interesting future research opportunities.,This paper fulfills an identified need to consider additional theories in explaining audit outcomes.