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1820Non-financial information is an important part of the information environment, and how non-financial information affects audit fees is worth paying attention to. However, most of the non-financial information disclosure of companies is based on the voluntary basis and lacks uniform standards and formats, which leads to poor comparability of non-financial information among different companies. At the same time, there is a strong endogeneity between a large amount of non-financial information disclosure and audit activities. Therefore, existing researches rarely directly investigate the relationship between them, and often fail to solve the endogenous problem well.
From December 2013 to December 2016, Shanghai Stock Exchange successively issued industrial information disclosure guidelines, which mandated that listed companies in relevant industries disclose operating information quarterly or monthly. This information has not been processed by the accrual accounting system, belonging to the level of management data. It provides auditors with incremental non-financial information that is different from before. The theoretical analysis of this paper shows that the disclosure of quarterly operating information will enable auditors to obtain more daily information of companies in a more timely manner, thus reducing corporate fraud and motivation, and this change will be recognized by auditors — reducing auditors’ direct input costs and audit risks, thus reducing audit fees. Based on the policy change, this paper constructs a DID model, and finds that after quarterly operating information disclosure, auditors’ audit fees for companies are significantly reduced. Mechanism testing shows that the phenomenon of audit fee decline is more likely to occur in companies with higher audit input and audit risks before quarterly operating information disclosure. The cross-sectional study finds that companies that disclose production and sales indicators in quarterly operating information, companies audited by weaker agencies, and private enterprises have a more significant decrease in audit fees.
The conclusions of this paper provide ideas for regulatory innovation: Regulatory authorities do not have to directly constrain transactions and their costs in the capital market, and helping the market to establish a useful information environment may spontaneously improve the cost and efficiency of the capital market. This approach is beneficial for regulators to explore more low-cost governance and supervision methods. In addition, this paper also provides suggestions for auditors to better play the role of accounting supervision.
