Abstract

This study reviews empirical research on audit quality in Asia markets. We restrict our review to papers published in the A+ and A tier1 accounting journals, ranked by Ministry of Science and Technology, from 2000 to 2015. The first part of this study introduces major capital markets and audit markets in Asia. The second part reviews the definitions and proxies of audit quality widely used in the literature. The third and fourth parts review the cross-country and single country audit quality research from the perspectives of audit demand, audit supply as well as the effects of regulatory intervention. The results indicate that, among the papers reviewed, CAR accepted most papers for cross-country research on audit quality. Whereas the single country research on audit quality appears more often in JAPP, CAR, AJPT and TAR. In addition, among the single country research, China audit market studies are ranked number one followed by Taiwan studies. As to the research topics, most cross-countries studies focus on the topics related to audit demand. Many single country studies, however, either examine the effects of the regulation changes or take advantage of the unique data set resulting from specific requirements in a given country to test the audit theory. This study concludes by assessing the challenges and limitations of cross-country research, analyzing the factors that make single country research popular, and providing future research avenues in audit quality for Asian countries.  

Keywords

audit demandaudit supplyaudit quality