4. We focus only on commercial banks to avoid differences in the financial statements between various types of banks (e.g. investment, savings, etc.)
5. Asset quality indicators have not been considered in the analysis due to the extremely high number of missing values in all the relevant variables
6. Only the name of the current auditor is available in Bankscope (i.e. most recent accounts, in our case 2004). Hence, we could not observe whether the auditor was a big one or not for the entire period of our study, or whether the bank has switched auditors or not