Company-Related Factors
The company-related controls aim to capture the potential effects of managers’ different
opportunities or incentives to manipulate earnings. SIZE () is the natural log of a company’s total
assets; larger companies have fewer incentives to manage earnings to avoid litigation (Lang and
Lundholm 1993). This variable also controls for the general effects of company size on accrual
quality and for the possibility of omitted correlated variables (Davidson and Neu 1993; Becker et al.
1998; Dechow and Dichev 2002). Consistent with the workload issues addressed by our primary
research proposition, Lambert et al. (2011) document potentially deleterious audit quality effects
associated with the accelerated filing deadlines of the SEC.9 We define the ‘‘large accelerated filers’’
indicator (LAFLR) (þ) as equal to 1 if a company has a market capitalization of $700 million or more,
and 0 otherwise. Similarly, we define the ‘‘accelerated filers’’ indicator (AFLR) (þ) as equal to 1 if a
company has a market equity capitalization between $75 million and $700 million, and 0 otherwise.
DREVENUES (þ) is the percentage of change in a company’s sales revenue and controls for
managers’ opportunities to manage accruals during periods of high company growth (Lee and
Mande 2003). It has a minimum winsorized value of 1.00 and a maximum winsorized value of
2.00 (Francis and Yu 2009). CFO () is operating cash flows deflated by lagged total assets and
controls for the association between accruals and cash flows. LOSS (þ) is an indicator that equals 1
if operating income after depreciation is negative, and 0 otherwise. It, thus, controls for potential
audit quality differences between loss and profit companies (Choi et al. 2007), as well as for the
incentive to take a ‘‘big bath’’ during years of poor financial performance. DEBT (þ) is total
liabilities deflated by total assets. Companies with more debt have higher incentives to manage
accruals to comply with their debt covenant agreements (DeFond and Jiambalvo 1994; Sweeney
1994). OPSEG (þ/) and GEOSEG (þ/) are the number of operating and geographical segments
reported in the Compustat database, respectively. These variables control for the potential
confounding effects of engaging auditors from different offices to complete the audits of companies
with multiple operating and geographical segments (Francis and Yu 2009).