 Delegated leadership at public accounting firmsClive Lennox, Chunfei Wang and Xi Wu Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2023, vol. 76, issue 1 Abstract: Public accounting firms are owned by all equity partners, but day-to-day management is generally delegated to a team of leaders. Using data from China, this study examines which equity partners are selected to the firm's national leadership team, and whether firmwide audit quality is related to leadership attributes. We find that a partner is more likely to be selected as a leader if the partner is more experienced in public company auditing and has attracted more new clients to the firm. Firmwide audit quality is higher when leaders are more experienced in public company audits or have a past record of larger audit adjustments, and is lower when leaders have attracted more high-risk new clients to the firm. Leadership attributes exhibit a relatively strong (weak) association with audit quality at the headquarters (branch offices). Moreover, audit quality is higher when a firm has more leaders in an audit-quality role. Keywords: Delegated leadership; Public accounting firms; Leadership attributes; Audit quality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaecon:v:76:y:2023:i:1:s0165410122000957 DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2022.101572 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Accounting and Economics is currently edited by J. L. Zimmerman, S. P. Kothari, T. Z. Lys and R. L. Watts More articles in Journal of Accounting and Economics from Elsevier |
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