What are the implications of major customer dependency, i.e., the degree of a supplier firm’s dependency on its major customers, for external auditors? While the conventional view emphasizes the negatives of major customer dependency for client business risk, we find that suppliers with more concentrated customer bases spend less on audit fees. The evidence is consistent with reduced audit effort due to efficiency gains in the audit process, especially when suppliers with more concentrated customer bases share the same auditors with their long-standing major customers. The audit fee discount we identify does not imply that audit quality declines with customer-base concentration. In fact, we find that suppliers with more concentrated customer bases are less likely to experience material restatements of previously audited financial statements. Taking the external auditors’ perspective, our study provides new managerial insights on the costs and benefits of major customer relationships for supplier firms.

Research in corporate financial reporting identifies two important roles of accounting accruals. First, accruals smooth fluctuations in operating cash flows. Second, accruals allow recognition of losses in an asymmetric timely manner. While these two roles imply different relations between individual accrual components and operating cash flow news, prior research often focuses on the properties of aggregate accruals. We investigate the role of individual accrual components and identify asymmetry in the relation of investment with operating cash flow news as a confounding factor. We show that this investment factor operates through depreciation and amortization accruals, which typically account for the bulk of aggregate accruals. Overall, our article demonstrates the importance of adopting a granular approach to identifying the different roles of individual accrual components.

We use the initial public offering (IPO) setting to provide evidence that the combination of valuation uncertainty and short-sales constraints generates significant equity market mispricing. The IPOs that we predict to be most susceptible to overpricing in the immediate aftermarket have first-day returns of +47% and lockup expiration returns of -9%. Our detailed analysis of securities lending market data confirms that these IPOs experience severe short-sales constraints that peak around the lockup expiration. Our paper both explains the anomalous pricing of IPOs and highlights the importance of valuation uncertainty and short-sales constraints in explaining equity mispricing.