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查核品質屬性、財務報表可比性與投資效率
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3. Findings/Implications
The empirical results of this study showed that comparability increases as audit firm
tenure or audit partner experience increases, indicating the a long audit tenure or an audit
partner with more experience could enhance comparability. However, the long-tenure
results indicated an insignificant relation between audit partner experience and the level of
comparability. For short- and middle-tenure engagements, the empirical results revealed
that audit partner experience is positively related to the level of comparability. These
results suggest auditor experience/expertise plays an important role in enhancing or
maintaining earnings quality during the early period of the auditor–client relationship,
consistent with the findings of Gul, Fung, and Jaggi (2009). The present study also found
that comparability is higher for firms audited by individual-level industry specialists, not
firm-level industry specialists. In addition, the audit partners' industry experience was
positively associated with comparability.
For testing investment efficiency, this paper provides evidence for a conditional
positive association between the level of comparability and investment for firms operating
in settings more prone to underinvestment. After decomposing total investments into two
components—capital and noncapital expenditures—results showed that a higher level of
comparability can mitigate investment inefficiency, including both under- and
overinvestment, in capital expenditures, but it has no effect on investment inefficiency in
noncapital expenditures.
4. Originality/Contribution
This paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, to my knowledge, the
issue of comparability has been largely unexplored in Taiwan. This paper seeks to fill this
gap and also provides a contribution to the role of comparability in developing countries.
In addition, the research method applied in this study could be the basis for evaluating the
benefits of IFRS in future studies. Second, this paper is one of the few studies that
investigate the determinants of financial statement comparability. An exception is a
concurrent paper by De Franco et al. (2011), but the present study is unique in that it
explicitly considers the role of audit quality attributes in improving comparability. Third,
this paper provides more direct evidence about the effect of financial reporting quality on
investment efficiency since better comparability increases investors’ ability to monitor
managerial investment decisions and gives a clearer picture about growth for internal
decision makers.