Mailänder, MartinMartinMailänder2023-04-132023-04-132023-02-20https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/107731Audit quality has been the subject of numerous debates during recent decades, especially in the face of global accounting scandals such as Enron and WorldCom. These events brought into question the credibility and quality of contemporary auditing worldwide, despite its utmost importance to a multitude of stakeholders. To get a better understanding of audit quality, various factors based on the audit quality frameworks defined by regulators and accounting boards have been closely followed by researchers and validated in several settings. Even though the factor media can be linked to IAASBs audit quality framework, it has been largely left untouched in research up to present. I argue that media should be considered as an additional important factor having an effect on audit quality. Recent research suggests that negative publicity of the audit client can also lead to corresponding spillover effects on the audit firm. I reason that this effect exerts pressure on the audit firm to perform the audit more rigorously, thereby increasing audit quality. As a result, the following research question will be raised: Do audit firms provide higher audit quality compared to the prior reporting period in case the audit client is facing increased negative publicity? The following paper contributes to the audit quality literature in several ways. First, only few research papers touch on the factor media. Those that do, mainly emphasize the role of the factor in a broader sense and only indirectly relate it to audit quality. By specifically investigating the role of the media on audit quality, the paper adds to the understanding of audit quality and the factors driving it. Second, most research papers only use one type of proxy for audit quality. In this paper, various alternative proxies will be included in the regression model, thereby providing a more nuanced view on the medias influence on audit quality and allowing to mitigate possible shortcomings of each proxy. Third, the paper provides valuable insights to key stakeholders. Companies with an increase in negative media articles or an increase in media coverage overall, should provide more credible financial figures due to expected higher quality audits. The results suggest that audit firms indeed provide higher quality audits compared to previous periods in case the audit client has experienced negative publicity in the current reporting period of the audit. Moreover, it could be shown that not only the sentiment but also an increase in the number of the media releases compared to prior years leads to better audit quality.enQualitätsauditMediaPublizitätEDIS-5298Audit QualityNegative Publicitydoctoral thesis