Partner Narcissism in a Private Market Setting: Consequences for Audit Reporting Decisions and Audit Pricing

This study investigates the association between audit engagement partners' narcissism (measured by the size of their signature) and audit reporting decisions and audit pricing in a private market setting. We analysed 133,267 (78,994) firm-year observations from (financially distressed) Belgian firms audited by 795 individual engagement partners from 2008 to 2017. Our results suggest that narcissism is positively associated with the likelihood that audit partners issue going-concern opinions to their financially distressed clients and with audit fees. An array of robustness checks corroborates these results. Additional results show that audit partner narcissism is positively associated with reporting conservatism. Interestingly, additional analyses also show that narcissism reverses the effect of gender on audit reporting decisions and audit pricing. Collectively, the evidence from this study suggests that partner narcissism is positively associated with conservative audit reporting decisions and audit pricing in a private market setting.