Continuing professional education and audit quality: evidence from an emerging market

Purpose - In this paper, the authors examine the association between the amount of continuing professional education (CPE) hours per staff and audit quality in terms of discretionary accruals and audit opinion. Design/methodology/approach - Several methodologies are adopted to test the hypotheses, including the ordinary least square (OLS) and logistic regression (Logistic). The authors also employ instrument variables regression with two least square (IVREG with 2SLS) and instrument variables probit model (IVProbit) to address the possible endogeneity and strengthen the validity of the main estimation results. Findings - The main results show that there is a positive and significant relationship between CPE hours per staff and audit quality. As the authors grouped CPE into four areas (finance, auditing and accounting, tax, law and regulations and others) the results are more robust for the sub-sample “accounting and audit” and “others”. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest that CPE hours per staff do not affect audit quality significantly for Big4 audit firms compared to non-Big4 firms. Research limitations/implications - The sample size of the present study is quite small because the transparency reports of the audit firms in Turkey have been available since 2013 and the authors could not reach some auditor demographics at the individual level and some attributes at the audit firm level. Besides, some alternative audit quality measures, such as audit effort, audit fees are not employed because they are not disclosed. Originality/value - This study contributes to the audit literature using Turkish audit firms. The authors believe that the setting of Turkey may yield interesting results because of the data it provides.