The Effect of Adopting International Standards on Auditing on Audit Quality－Evidence from Chinese Capital Market－

In order to improve the audit quality of the Chinese capital market, China recently adopted new audit standards, which converged to the International Standards on Auditing(ISAs) from the year of 2006. This study examined whether convergence to ISAs improved the audit quality. Audit quality is measured by discretionary accrual estimated by 5 models. Based the firms listed on Shanghai Stock Market, we conducted a univariate and multivariate tests to compare the discretionary accrual of the firms from 2004, 2005(pre－CSAs period) with the firms from 2006, 2007(post－CSAS period). Results show that the discretionary accrual significantly decreased after the ISAs adopted, which means the audit quality of China increased significantly. As an additional analysis, we tested with signed discretionary accruals and came to a similiar conclusion. This finding has policy implications for improving the efficiency of China's capital market, and will be meaningful to the countries preparing to adopt ISAs.