Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

The conference is organized by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) Center for Economic Analysis, in conjunction with the Journal of Accounting Research (JAR).

Date:  October 20-21, 2016

Location:  Washington, DC - By invitation only

Overview

The conference aims to foster high quality economic research on audit-related topics, including the economic impact auditing and audit regulation have on capital markets.

Conference organizers are Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago and PCAOB; Christian Leuz, University of Chicago and PCAOB; Patricia Ledesma, PCAOB; and Michael Gurbutt, PCAOB.

Topics

The conference organizers encourage the submission of papers about all aspects of auditing of corporations, as well as the impact of regulation and oversight. Papers may be theoretical, archival or experimental in nature.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Role of the audit in capital formation and economic growth
• Application of regulatory economics to auditing
• Market impact of audit regulation and oversight
• Industrial organization of the audit profession
• Political economy of auditing and accounting
• Economic and social incentives in the audit profession
• Economic effects of the application of audit standards to audits of emerging growth companies
• Economic and audit quality impacts of international regulatory audit reforms
• Effects of audit and financial reporting failures on financial markets
• Effects of multi-layered principal-agent relationships present in auditing
• Applications of behavioral economics to auditing and financial reporting
• Proxies for and indicators of audit quality and their potential usage and impact

The conference organizers particularly encourage the submission of papers of relevance to projects listed on the PCAOB’s standard-setting agenda (available at: http://pcaobus.org/Standards/Pages/default.aspx), economic analysis in standard setting (refer to PCAOB’s Staff Guidance on Economic Analysis in PCAOB Standard Setting, available at: http://pcaobus.org/Standards/Pages/05152014_Guidance.aspx) and other issues of relevance to the PCAOB’s mission which, under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, is to protect the interests of investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, accurate and independent audit reports.

Submission Details

The organizers invite the submission of working papers by August 12, 2016. 

Papers will be blind-reviewed by the Program Committee. Submissions to the conference are not considered submissions to JAR. Papers can, of course, be submitted separately to JAR, in which case they enter the normal review process. Moreover, JAR editors may solicit conference papers for publication in JAR. In such cases, the authors will be invited to submit their papers to JAR after the conference.

The PCAOB will reimburse presenters and discussants reasonable travel expenses and accommodations.

Paper Submission Procedure

Please send a PDF version of your paper, with a separate title page to facilitate a blind-review, by August 12, 2016 to the Center for Economic Analysis at CEA@pcaobus.org specifying "PCAOB/JAR Conference" in the subject line.

Program Committee Members

(*) Denotes Editors and Advisory Editors of JAR.

Conference Attendance

Attendance is free and by invitation only. Academics interested in receiving an invitation should contact the Center for Economic Analysis at CEA@pcaobus.org.