This study documents that audit fees, and hence audit quality, and governance reflect two
countervailing relations, namely, a fee increase because of exogenous changes in expected liability
that require greater auditing and other mechanisms to attain better governance, and a fee reduction
because auditors reduce the price of risk to reflect the benefits of better governance. The study
period provides an interesting setting to test these relations because it covers the passage of the
Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which imposed a substantial cost on many companies to strengthen
governance, including increased auditing and internal control spending. Yet, after controlling for
such increased spending, our results also suggest that better governance reduces the cost of
auditing