Audit quality and liquidity policy

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine whether audit quality influences auditees' liquidity policy. Design/methodology/approach: The author uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimators, and we focus on a panel of US publicly traded companies (36,118 company-year observations) over the period of 2004–2019 to examine the effect of audit quality on auditees' cash reserves. Findings: The author finds that high quality audits are negatively related to auditees' cash reserves. Additional analyses show that the potential channel by which audit quality influences these reserves is financial constraints (FC). Particularly, his results suggest that an auditee's FC serve as an intermediary in the association between audit quality and auditee's cash reserves. Ultimately, we show that high quality audits raise the market value relevance of an extra dollar in cash reserves. Originality/value: By linking two distinct research lines of audit quality and corporate cash reserves, this study adds to both lines of literature, as it is a novel one (to the best of the author’s knowledge) to provide evidence about the effect of audit quality on the auditees' liquidity policy (a real economic decision and internal financial policy) that ultimately boosts the auditees' investment efficiency. The author’s findings are consistent with influential monitoring and an insurance-like function of high quality audits in reducing information asymmetry and its consequences. His results also support the argument that auditees' transparency through high quality audits can be a pivotal determinant of their liquidity policy.