338 MAB 90(9)SEPTEMBER 2016 EDITORIAL What do we know about audit quality? An intriguing question for which society seems to have a ready- made answer, while to the audit industry is much less clear about what it takes to get there. Society would seem to impose a zero-mistake tolerance on the au- dit industry. Surely society does not want to pay the price that would take audit quality to a level where quality is irreproachable. For that matter, it is not even clear that auditees who pay a premium fee get better quality. For instance, while industry speciali- zation tends to have a positive effect on audit fees (Numan & Willekens, 2012a), competitive pressure may infict a negative effect on quality. Numan and Willekens (2012b) report a negative impact on audit quality delivered by an auditor who faces competitive pressure from competitors who resemble the focal au- ditor in its range of activities. These results seem to suggest that society varies the price it is willing to pay for an audit. To the extent that audit fee is associated with the quality of the audit, it would appear that au- dit quality is not uniform across audit engagements. If that is the case how should we interpret the expec- tations of society with regard to audit quality? What determines audit quality? When is audit quality (in) suffcient? However, before we can even begin to an- swer that question we frst need to agree on what ex- actly is audit quality. Is it possible to measure audit quality? During its frst conference, the Foundation for Au- diting Research 1 (FAR) takes issue with exactly this topic: “What do we know about audit quality?” At the conference academics as well as practitioners gave their take on what makes audits good. This issue of MAB elaborates on these topics and gives the foor to the discussants of the papers that Jere Francis, Mar- leen Willekens, Suraj Srinivasan and Robert Knechel presented at the FAR conference, May 9 and 10, 2016. Liesbeth Bruynseels, Christine Nolder, Jeroen van Raak, and Joost van Buuren discussed their papers during the conference. An exciting feature of the FAR conference was the contribution of auditors from practice, an auditee, as well as the audit oversight body. They took the foor in the panel, as presenters in front of the class room or as an interested auditor present in the class room. This MAB issue opens with a paper by Liesbeth Bruynseels and Herman van Brenk that presents a dis- cussion of the presentation Jere Francis gave. Jere’s discussion at the conference focused on his study (Francis, Pinnuck, and Watanabe, 2014) that reveals that auditors have a particular style of auditing lead- ing to the observation that (1) two companies in the same industry and year indeed have more compara- ble earnings when they are audited by the same Big 4 frm, and (2) that companies audited by the same Big 4 auditor will have more comparable earnings than companies audited by the same Non-Big 4 auditor. The frst fnding is according to Bruynseels and Van Brenk’s discussion at odds with the idea that frms differ and that therefore similarities in their fnancial statements should not be observed. Francis, Pinnuck and Watanabe (2014) attribute the second observa- tion to the fact that Big 4 auditors have more resourc- es to standardize their audits. However, in their dis- cussion Liesbeth Bruynseels and Herman van Brenk, propose that auditees may select auditors with par- ticular styles. Marleen Willekens presented her working paper co- authored with Ann Gaeremynck and Robert Knechel (Gaeremynck, Willekens & Knechel, 2016). She took issue with the (effcient) production of audits. What is ef fcient in this regard? This is by no means a straightforward question to ask unless one assumes that quality is fxed. While we know that assumption is not fulflled in reality answering what is effcient pertains to two important dimensions: effcient at the micro-economic level and at the societal level. Wille- kens examines audit effciency from the micro-eco- nomic level. The paper demonstrates that partner ten- ure is positively affecting audit efficiency. Interestingly it appears that the work clients execute in preparation of the audit work has a negative rela- tion with effciency. One wonders how and whether this fnding extends to how well the auditee has or- ganized its internal controls. After all, the auditor can more or less depend on these internal controls in de- signing its audit conditional on how well the controls operate. Willekens et al. (2016) have also examined that question and fnd that “no effciencies are real- ized by relying on internal controls”. Christine Nold- er and Sytse Duiverman discuss in this issue the pa- What practitioners and academics want to know about audit quality Jan Bouwens