Benchmarking the production of audit services: An efficiency frontier approach

To compete effectively in an increasingly competitive audit market audit firms need information on the efficiency of the audit services they offer. This study reports on the cost and labor efficiency for a sample of 114 audit engagements conducted by one of the (then) Big 6 audit firms. Estimating the efficiency of audit engagements is a form of benchmarking, of which economics oriented research has seen many applications. The application to auditing however is, as far as we know, relatively new. To determine the cost and labor efficiency of the audit engagements we employ the statistical technique of stochastic frontier estimation. Using models from the well-known and established audit fee and audit production literature we find that for our sample audit services are produced in a cost and labor efficient manner. Keywords: accounting and auditing, economics; audit production, cost and labor efficiency, stochastic frontier estimation Data availability: The data used in this study are proprietary to the audit firm studied and cannot be released by the authors. Address for correspondence: Caren Schelleman, Maastricht University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, MARC, PO Box 616, 6200 MD MAASTRICHT, The Netherlands. Phone: ++31.43.388.37.14. Fax: ++31.43.388.48.76. E-mail: [email protected] ;

Resource-based view as a perspective for public tourism management research: evidence from two brazilian tourism destinations

This study adopted the Resource-Based View approach to analyse two public organizations located in Curitiba and Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. The focus was to verify how organizational and tourist resources are being used for planning and public management in these cities. Data collection was made by adopting semi-structured interviews with two groups: public and private sector managers. The insights of these two groups and the use of documentary secondary data made it possible to infer that the main resource for the implementation of public policies was organizational architecture. However, the most influential resource in public tourism management is the existence of tourist resources and organizational resources related to internal and external relationships and organizational culture. The analysis demonstrated that the researched cities do not use or do not know how to use the available resources in value-creating activities for local tourist management. Both cities present imperfections that do not earmark the full exploitation of organizational resources, compromising the exploration of available tourist resources

Economische analyses van de regelgeving van de externe verslaggeving

Economische analyses van de regelgeving van de externe verslaggevin

Lezers reageren Invloeden van de markt op de kwaliteit van accountantscontrole

Lezers reageren Invloeden van de markt op de kwaliteit van accountantscontrol