BIG4 or Non-BIG4 Auditors: Their Impact on Audit Quality during the Global Financial Crisis

The objective of this paperis to examine the relationship between auditor tenure and discretionaryaccruals as a proxy of audit quality. The main finding is that thisrelationship was found to be negative for BIG4 and non-BIG4 auditors in crisis and non-crisis periods,for both German and French companies. In addition, Italian and Spanishcompanies seem to interplay in crisis and non-crisis periods being eithernegative or not for BIG4 and non-BIG4 auditors. The findings imply that thelarger the country, the better the audit quality and this seems to beconfirmed by graphs and statistically by the one-sample T-test.