The effect of audit quality on financial reporting quality, conditioned on the firm’s innate characteristics. This graph illustrates how the client firm’s
innate characteristics (I) affect the relation between audit quality (AQ) and financial reporting quality (FRQ). We consider two firms, one with innate
characteristics that make it hard (IHard), and another easy (IEasy), to map its underlying economics into the financial statements. To focus on the effects of
the innate characteristics, we assume that their financial reporting systems are the same, and to simplify the analysis we assume the relation is linear.
The graph shows that high AQ assures a higher level of FRQ for IEasy than for IHard, because the achievable level of FRQ is higher for IEasy than for IHard. Thus,
the firm’s innate characteristics constrain the assured level of financial reporting quality that results from high audit quality. Specifically, high AQ can only
assure a level of FRQ that is achievable given the firm’s innate characteristics, which constrains its financial reporting quality