卖空机制、诉讼风险与审计收费

Short Sales Mechanism,Litigation Risk and Audit Fees

基于我国推出融资融券业务这一"自然实验",文章考察了卖空机制如何通过改变诉讼风险而影响公司审计收费。研究发现,卖空机制的引入增加了公司股价下跌的压力,并增强了投资者挖掘公司负面消息的动机,从而导致公司审计的诉讼风险提高,会计师事务所要求更高的审计收费。进一步的分析显示,由于国有企业的信息披露环境较差,卖空机制对国有企业审计收费的提升作用更加明显;由于"四大"具有更高的赔偿能力,卖空机制更加显著地增加了"四大"审计公司的审计收费;对于法制环境较差地区的企业,由于管理层更有动机隐藏坏消息,公司审计收费因卖空机制的存在而显著提高。

This paper examines how the short sales mechanism affects firms＇ audit fees through the changes in litigation risk,based on the natural experiment of securities margin trading in China.It comes to the conclusions that the introduction of short sales mechanism reinforces the pressure of the fall in stock prices and strengthens the incentive of investors to search bad news of companies,leading to the increase in audit litigation risk of companies and higher audit fees required by accounting firms.Further analysis suggests that the short sales mechanism plays a more obvious role in the increase in audit fees of state-owned enterprises,owing to poor information disclosure environment in state-owned enterprises;due to stronger compensation capacities of＂Big Four＂,the short sales mechanism significantly results in the rise in audit fees of＂Big Four＂;as for enterprises located in areas with poorer legal environment,because the management has the motivations to hide bad news,their audit fees significantly increase because of the existence of the short sales mechanism.