Purpose: This paper aims to examine the association between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and audit effort by focusing on audit hours. This paper also explores whether significant political uncertainty might amplify the positive association between EPU and audit effort by focusing on Korea. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses 21,543 Korean firm-year observations from 2005 to 2018 in an audit hour determinant model, as well as EPU following Baker et al. (2016) and audit hour to proxy audit effort. Findings: EPU is positively associated with audit hours, indicating that auditors work more audit hours in response to firms’ high EPU resulting from higher earnings manipulation risk. Further, whether this positive association between EPU and audit effort might be altered by significant political uncertainty is investigated using a presidential election dummy. The empirical results show that auditors work additional audit hours during fiscal years in which presidential elections occur, given high EPU. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper might be the first empirical attempt to use audit hour data with EPU to provide practical implications to academia or auditors.

This paper examines the association between analyst coverage and corporate social performance, using comprehensive donation expense data from Korea. Following analyst “investor recognition view”, analyst coverage might be the one of the key determinants of firms’ CSP to higher firms’ reputational capital. The empirical results suggest that analyst coverage is, on average, positively associated with corporate social performance (CSP) and that this positive association is more pronounced in a non-chaebol (i.e., non-large industrial conglomerate) sample. Further this result is consistent with a battery of robustness tests, such as alternative use of CSP, interaction analysis, two-stage least square regression (2SLS) and alternative use of analyst coverage. This paper goes beyond prior literature using audited donation expense and chaebol data, this paper shows that analysts could partially provide information to enhance firms’ reputations and thus their reputational capital by attending to CSP which would be regarded as pertinent firms’ sustainability. Furthermore, this tendency is more pronounced in relatively lower-reputation firms, such as non-chaebol ones in Korea. Mainstream literature on CSR is conducted within the context of developed countries, such as the U.S. or the U.K., leaving the empirical question as to whether such results apply to other developing countries such as Korea. So, using unique corporate giving data, this paper investigate analyst coverage might enhance firms’ CSP even in a relatively poor information environment such as Korea.

This study examines the effects of labor union influence on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of Korean firms, which is regarded as a pertinent sustainable factor to meet the various demands of the organizations around a firm. Further, this paper implies that labor unions might be part of a group of stakeholders that affect firms’ CSR activity. The empirical results suggest labor union existence as well as the labor unionization ratio is negatively associated with firms’ CSR activity. Additionally, this negative association is more pronounced for non-owner manager firms. Additional robustness tests using quantile regression, two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression, and the Heckman two-step analysis support the above findings. Therefore, we conclude that labor unions might cooperate with non-owner managers to decrease firms’ CSR activity because decreasing CSR expenditure makes for a favorable wage negotiation process that advocates labor unions’ rent seeking behavior and non-owner managers’ agreement with labor unions in terms of business performance during their tenure.

This study investigates the effect of financial analyst coverage on audit efforts by examining the association between the number of analyst followings and audit hours. Existing literatures report that there are inconsistent results between analyst coverage and audit efforts, and most studies used audit fee as a proxy for audit efforts. However, audit fee may cause measurement error. We consider that audit hour is a better proxy for measuring audit efforts than audit fee because practically auditors are less likely to charge extra audit fee for their additional efforts in competitive audit market. Also, after audit engagement contract, the amount of audit fee is almost fixed. Thus, it cannot reflect variable auditors decision whether inputting additional efforts or not during audit service. Intuitively, audit hours are more accurate measure of audit efforts as long as it indicates how much hours auditors work. For the above reasons, we use unique dataset of audit hours in Korea. We find that analyst coverage is positively associated with audit hour. This means auditors make more efforts on their audit service in case of greater analyst following, and they crucially consider reputational damage from audit failure when they provide audit services to their clients with great analyst following. Next, we still observe positive relation in both pre and post global financial crisis periods. Lastly, we find that BIG4 auditors are more concerned about reputational loss than Non-Big4 in case of greater analyst following.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a pertinent strategy to enhance consumer perception of product quality and a company’s reputation. A growing body of literature has investigated whether corporate charitable contributions play a similar role to that of corporate social responsibility. Controversy still remains over the cause and effect of corporate charitable contributions. This study’s objective was to examine whether auditors apply more effort when reviewing firms with a higher level of corporate charitable contributions. For example, if auditors perceive corporate charitable contributions as the opportunistic behavior of managers, then the auditors thoroughly review and prepare financial statements. However, if auditors assess corporate charitable contributions as one of a firm’s ethical responsibilities, then they are not likely to put in more effort when reviewing such firms. This paper aims to examine how capital market participants assess a firm’s charitable contributions. Using an extensive set of data for Korea from 2008 to 2015, we conducted a battery of robustness analyses to address various endogeneity issues using the abnormal audit hour model, propensity score matching method, and 2SLS regression. We found that corporate charitable contributions were positively associated with audit hours. It indicated that auditors applied more effort when they reviewed firms with corporate charitable contributions. The results suggest that auditors in Korea do not perceive corporate charitable contributions as a CSR activity but rather as an indication of the opportunistic behavior of managers.