CEO inside debt and industry specialist auditor

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to examine the effect of executive compensation incentives, specifically CEO inside debt holdings, on the choice of industry specialist auditor. Design/methodology/approach High inside debt holdings are expected to constrain excessive managerial risk-taking and align the interests of managers and outside debtholders. The authors hypothesize that reduced debtholders’ expropriation concerns will decrease the demand for high audit quality, measured by industry specialization. The authors investigate a sample of US firms from 2006 to 2018 using OLS regression and use CEO relative leverage to proxy for CEO inside debt holdings. The authors conduct an additional two-stage least squares regression analysis to address potential endogeneity issues. Findings The paper finds that firms with higher levels of CEO inside debt tend not to appoint an auditor with industry specialization. This result is consistent with the notion that inside debt mitigates agency conflicts between managers and debtholders, reducing the demand for high-quality audits as a monitoring mechanism. The paper also finds that among firms which are excessively leveraged, those with higher levels of CEO inside debt tend to appoint an industry specialist auditor. Originality/value The findings contribute to the literature on agency cost and auditor choice by demonstrating that CEO inside debt has both substitutive and complementary effects on demand for industry specialist auditors.