Audit Production Efficiency And Audit Quality

Audit efficiency and audit quality,as two important dimensions of audit service,have been widely concerned by all sectors of society.The audit production efficiency concerns the cost efficiency problem,the accounting firm will choose to invest the limited audit resources to meet the requirements of the target output;But on the other hand,the most important job of the audit firm,a special kind of intermediary service agency,is to provide related services that must be able to ensure reasonable capital market information,so the audit quality concerns that information are true and correct.This paradox makes us think about an important question:in the background of current audit industry,the auditor will sacrifice the audit quality for audit efficiency?This paper will discuss the problem.At present,there are relatively few researches on the correlation between audit production efficiency and audit quality.One kind of study is based on the perspective of accounting firms,data envelopment analysis(DEA)has been used to explore the impact of audit quality on audit production efficiency.There are also studies using the firm's input data find that audit production efficiency and audit quality may change in the same direction.But the existing literature have few researches from a single audit project level of firm to go into the influence of the audit production efficiency on audit quality research.This paper will focus on discussing if the audit efficiency may effect on audit quality and its path from the audit project level.We will define the audit efficiency from the perspective of single audit project level as the audit production efficiency,using DEA analysis method,and combing with the human capital theory,scale economy theory,social capital theory,transaction cost theory and the theory of asset specificity,respectively from two paths of the pure audit technical efficiency and scale efficiency to analyze its influence on audit quality.Further,this paper also explores the audit clients size on relationship between the audit efficiency and audit quality.Our sample is based on all the main board listed companies in 2013-2015 for large data We use quantitative analysis with DEA method to calculate the relative project audit efficiency value and the grouping variable to measure the audit the production efficiency.We use modified Jones model handling the absolute value of the accrued profit and surplus value to measure the audit quality.Then,we checkout the effect of audit efficiency on of audit quality and its paths.The results show that improving the audit production efficiency at the audit project level will improve the audit quality correspondingly.Disintegrating the two paths that influence the efficiency of the project audit production efficiency,we found that improving audit quality is mainly due to pure technical audit production efficiency,and the effect of audit scale efficiency is limited to audit quality.Furthermore,we have also found that customer size may inhibit the positive impact of audit production efficiency on audit quality.This study will help to reveal the internal resource allocation of audit firms and provide internal management advice for the certified public accountants to improve independent audit efficiency.For regulators,this research will strengthen supervision of the accounting firm "to do strongly does"strategy implementation and provide empirical evidence.