Big 4 Auditors and Audit Quality in Non-Listed Companies. Empirical Evidence from Italy

This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND) in the series Economia - Ricerche

This research monograph aims to investigate audit quality in Italian nonlisted companies. More specifically, it addresses the question of whether Big 4 auditors perform high-quality audit in non-listed companies. The key findings are that (i) Big 4 auditors provide high-quality audit compared to other auditors in terms of both accounting and real earnings management; (ii) such auditors are more independent than other auditors. The findings provide an analysis of the drivers of real and accrual-based earnings management, thereby producing some compelling evidence on audit quality in the context of the Italian non-listed companies.