Credit rating agency response to appointment of female audit partners: evidence from the UK

Owusu, Andrews and Zalata, Alaa Mansour (2023) Credit rating agency response to appointment of female audit partners: evidence from the UK. Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, 50, [100525]. (doi:10.1016/j.intaccaudtax.2023.100525).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We study the impact of appointing women as audit partners from a credit rating agency perspective. We investigate whether credit rating agencies value the appointment of women to audit partner positions differently than when men are appointed. This study uses a United Kingdom (UK) balanced panel data of 2472 firm-year observations of public quoted companies from 2009 to 2016 and analyzes how credit rating agencies respond to such appointments. We find a more positive credit score reaction after appointment of a female audit partner than that following the appointment of a male audit partner. This finding suggests that, from a credit rating agency perspective, there seems to be a business case for a particular gender when it comes to appointing audit partners.

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Accepted/In Press date: 21 June 2022

e-pub ahead of print date: 11 February 2023

Published date: 1 March 2023

Additional Information: Funding Information: We thank Robert Larson (Editor-in-Chief) and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the earlier version of this paper. We also thank the conference participants of the Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association and the British Accounting and Finance Association for their constructive suggestions. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors

Keywords: Audit partner gender, Audit quality, Credit scores, Debt market

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