감사인 계속감사기간과 고객기업의 이익 지속성

Auditor tenure is associated with two perspectives. On the one hand, the perspective of auditor expertise argues that auditors’ better understanding of clients’ business and audit risk during the long auditor－client relationship can increase expertise. On the other hand, economic incentive perspective insists that loner tenure may be associated with reduced auditor independence due to higher client dependency. In this paper, I investigate the association between auditor tenure and client earnings persistence by extending prior perspectives. My empirical results show that the increase in auditor tenure is positively related with the client earnings persistence. This is consistent with both of the results which use the tenure itself or the natural logarithm of the tenure. The results show that the positive relation between auditor tenure and client earnings persistence are consistent in both Big and non－Big auditor as well as industry expert and non－expert auditor sub－samples. Furthermore, the increased earnings persistence is derived by only accruals but not by cash flows. In additional tests, the results are similar when the auditor mandatory rotation period is excluded. Also, considering the nonlinear relation between audit quality and audit tenure, I divided tenure into short, medium, and long and find that the result is more significant in the long tenure.