审计师行业专长与汇率风险

Auditor Industry Expertise and Exchange Rate Exposure

随着中国企业走向海外,汇率风险成为企业面临的现实问题,本文试图证明审计师行业专长在公司汇率风险管理方面的作用,通过中介效应检验揭示其中的机制。回归结果显示,行业专家服务的客户有更低的汇率风险,这是因为行业专家在审计的过程中积累了诸多应对汇率风险的方法和策略。中介效应检验的结果表明,行业专家主要采用经营对冲和金融对冲降低汇率风险,但是行业专家通过盈余平滑手段减少汇率风险的证据不足。改变汇率风险和行业专长的计算与测量方法,考虑自选择问题,控制公司-年度固定效应,采用倾向性得分匹配样本后,行业专长与公司汇率风险的负相关关系依然稳健。本文的研究对公司管理汇率风险、会计师事务所发展行业专长有重要启示作用。

As Chinese enterprises go overseas, exchange rate risk exposure becomes a real problem. This paper examines the effect of auditor's industry expertise on client's exchange rate exposure and uses mediation effect tests to reveal the inherent mechanism. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that clients audited by industry experts have lower exchange rate exposure, because auditors with industry expertise have gained knowledge on dealing with exchange rate exposure through their past audit experience. Further tests reveal that auditors with industry expertise help clients reduce exchange rate exposure by introducing more operational hedging and financial hedging, but no evidence is found as to whether earnings smoothing is used to control exchange rate risk. The results still hold with alternative measures of exchange rate risk and auditor industry expertise, which are also robust after we control for firm-year fixed effect and sei-selection bias, and when propensity score matching method is adopted to control for endogeneity problems. Those findings provide insights on firms' management of exchange rate exposure and auditors' development of industry expertise.