臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.30 NO.2

Do Government Initiatives and Reasons for Auditor-Client Realignment Influence Audit Fees and Audit Quality? Evidence from China 238 4.2.2 Effects on Audit Fees As outlined in Research Question 2, we examine whether the reasons for auditor- client realignment and the government initiative jointly affect audit fees. Therefore, the dependent variable in Model (2) is the amount of audit fees paid by clients to auditors. Following the extant literature (e.g., Huang et al., 2015), we measure audit fees by taking their natural logarithm ( LNAF) . This transformation allows us to convert the dependent variable from a discontinuous one into a continuous one. To examine the impact of the reasons for auditor-client realignment on audit fees, we follow the above analysis by categorizing realignment reasons into client-related ( REASON_CLIENT ), CPA firm- related ( REASON_CPA ), and government-related ( REASON_GOV ). We also include the initiative ( POST_2007 ) as an independent variable. Table 6 E ff ects of Reasons for Auditor-Client Realignment and of the Governmental Initiative on Audit Fees Variable Coefficient p -value Intercept 7.053 <0.001 REASON_CLIENT 0.184 0.018 REASON_CPA 0.085 0.268 REASON_GOV -0.081 0.367 POST_2007 0.119 0.005 REASON_CLIENT × POST_2007 -0.163 0.058 REASON_CPA × POST_2007 -0.067 0.434 REASON_GOV × POST_2007 0.096 0.352 LNTA 0.293 <0.001 RECTA 0.091 0.500 INVTA -0.051 0.609 LIQ -0.027 0.001 DA 0.001 0.992 ROA -0.162 0.010 ADJRETURN -0.017 0.490 STDRET 2.959 0.126 CIFIRM -0.188 0.638 CICPA -0.043 0.673 EXPFIRM 0.018 0.686 EXPCPA 0.298 0.036 LEGALFORMLLP 0.142 0.045 LEGALFORMLLC 0.040 0.528 TOP10 -0.555 <0.001