Research On The Impact Of Negative Media Coverage On Audit Fee And Its Influence Mechanism

Recently,with the development of network technology,especially the development of mobile Internet technology,the impact of media on politics,economy,society and social life has become so significant that more and more scholars have paid attention to it.In the field of finance and accounting,there has been a large literature about the impact of the media on corporate governance and asset pricing,but there are very little research about the impact of the media on auditor behavior.Thus,this paper investigates the impact of negative media coverage on auditor behavior through the perspective of audit fees.Using the data from our country's non-financial listed companies during the period 2013-2018,this article first investigates the relation between the amount of media negative report and audit fee and the relation between the amount of media negative report and audit delay,a proxy for audit effort,then tests whether audit delay plays an intermediary role between the amount of media negative report and audit fee,and finally investigates whether the tone of media coverage,the nature of the client and the audit firm sizes will affect the relation between the amount of media negative report and audit fee and the relation between the amount of media negative report and audit delay.The results show that,(1)negative media coverage will increase audit fee;(2)negative media coverage will increase the audit delay,and the audit delay plays a partial mediating effect between negative media coverage and audit delay,indicating that the increase in audit fee caused by the negative media coverage is partly due to the increase in audit effort;(3)due to the significant difference between state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises in the motivation of fraud and operation stability,the auditor is less sensitive to negative media coverage when auditing stateowned enterprises,and the increased audit effort and audit fee of state-owned enterprises are less than non-state-owned enterprises;(4)when facing the client with the same amount of negative media coverage,there is no difference in audit fee charged by BIG4 and Non-BIG4 auditors,but the increase of audit delay for BIG4 auditors is smaller than Non-BIG4,due to their advantage of professional technology and human resources.