季度经营信息披露与审计收费——非财务信息披露监管创新的溢出效应研究

Quarterly Operating Information Disclosure and Audit Fees:A Study on the Spillover Effect of Non-financial Information Disclosure Regulatory Innovation

本文利用上海证券交易所强制要求相关行业上市公司按季度披露经营数据这一政策变化,构建双重差分(DID)模型对季度经营信息披露与审计收费的关系进行检验。研究发现,季度经营信息披露后,审计师对公司的审计收费显著降低。机制检验表明,审计收费下降的现象更可能出现在季度经营信息披露前审计投入和审计风险较高的公司中。截面研究进一步发现,季度经营信息中披露产销量指标的公司、能力较弱的事务所审计的公司及民营企业的审计收费下降更为显著。本文的研究结论说明,季度经营信息披露这一非财务信息监管创新对审计市场带来了积极的溢出影响,从外部监管视角为审计市场变革提供了重要启示。

Non-financial information is an important part of the information environment,and how non-financial information affects audit fees is worth paying attention to.However,most of the nonfinancial information disclosure of companies is based on the voluntary basis and lacks uniform standards and formats,which leads to poor comparability of non-financial information among different companies.At the same time,there is a strong endogeneity between a large amount of non-financial information disclosure and audit activities.Therefore,existing researches rarely directly investigate the relationship between them,and often fail to solve the endogenous problem well.From December 2013 to December 2016,Shanghai Stock Exchange successively issued industrial information disclosure guidelines,which mandated that listed companies in relevant industries disclose operating information quarterly or monthly.This information has not been processed by the accrual accounting system,belonging to the level of management data.It provides auditors with incremental non-financial information that is different from before.The theoretical analysis of this paper shows that the disclosure of quarterly operating information will enable auditors to obtain more daily information of companies in a more timely manner,thus reducing corporate fraud and motivation,and this change will be recognized by auditors—reducing auditors’direct input costs and audit risks,thus reducing audit fees.Based on the policy change,this paper constructs a DID model,and finds that after quarterly operating information disclosure,auditors’audit fees for companies are significantly reduced.Mechanism testing shows that the phenomenon of audit fee decline is more likely to occur in companies with higher audit input and audit risks before quarterly operating information disclosure.The cross-sectional study finds that companies that disclose production and sales indicators in quarterly operating information,companies audited by weaker agencies,and private enterprises have a more significant decrease in audit fees.The conclusions of this paper provide ideas for regulatory innovation:Regulatory authorities do not have to directly constrain transactions and their costs in the capital market,and helping the market to establish a useful information environment may spontaneously improve the cost and efficiency of the capital market.This approach is beneficial for regulators to explore more low-cost governance and supervision methods.In addition,this paper also provides suggestions for auditors to better play the role of accounting supervision.