
Kris HardiesUniversity of Antwerp | UA · Accounting and finance
Kris Hardies
Doctor of Philosophy
About
62
Publications
44,397
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Introduction
Kris Hardies (08/27/1984) currently works at the Department of Accounting and Finance , University of Antwerp (Belgium). Kris does research in accounting (mainly auditing), capital markets, gender, personality and individual differences, and social media.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (62)
We provide field-based evidence on antecedents to auditors’ skeptical actions, with participants including over 600 auditors across all ranks from six audit firms. We evaluate the relative importance of situational, client, and individual auditor characteristics, along with measures of auditors’ cognitive processing in relation to their self-report...
This article synthesizes research on auditors’ ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ personality traits. Our systematic literature review identified 34 studies that met our inclusion criteria. These studies provide insights into auditors’ personality traits, their impact on audit quality, and their association with various professional behaviors and outcomes. Our re...
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 fro...
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 analyzed 133,267 (78,994) firm-year observations from (financially distressed) Belgian firms audited by 795 individual engagement partners fro...
Literature reviews can potentially contribute to our knowledge and understanding of a particular topic. However, consistent with anecdotal evidence, we document that literature reviews in auditing are of low quality in implementing best practice guidelines for conducting and reporting systematic reviews. We rely on existing guidelines and best prac...
This study uses survival analysis to examine employee turnover in the auditing profession. Building on the Job Demands-Resources model, I analyze the impact of job characteristics (demands and resources) and personal characteristics on organizational turnover. The study is based on a survey among a sample of 309 employees who either were or had bee...
Background
Despite their significance, limited research has been conducted on sexual harassment in professional service firms (PSFs).
Methods
Survey data were gathered from 321 Belgian employees (155 women, 166 men) of global accounting and law firms. The prevalence of sexual harassment in PSFs based on traditional sexual harassment items and not-...
The hobo syndrome (i.e., the wanderlust someone posits to frequently change employers) has a behavioural (i.e., frequent job-quitting behaviour) and an attitudinal dimension (i.e., attitudes towards frequent job-quitting). Across two studies, we examine both dimensions across 348 career starters. By doing so, we expand our understanding of Ghiselli...
Parents sharing information about their children on social network sites (SNSs) (i.e., sharenting) is common today. However, previous work confronting parents’ and adolescents’ views on sharenting and related privacy concerns is limited. Therefore, the present study scrutinizes parents’ motives for sharenting and adolescents’ attitudes toward share...
Essay accompanying the lecture delivered at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on May 12, 2021, as part of the Emile Verhaeren chair. In this essay, I argue for a better understanding of social norms’ role in upholding existing gender hierarchies.
We integrate existing conceptual models of auditors’ professional skepticism with the Theory of Planned Behavior to develop an empirically testable model that explains the processes underlying the association between trait skepticism and skeptical actions. We use data from a sample of 663 auditors across all ranks who each completed an experiential...
Prior research finds that women receive lower salaries than men. Similarly, we show that female audit partners in Belgium receive significantly lower compensation than male partners. However, there are alternative explanations for the pay gap other than gender discrimination. For example, the gap in compensation could reflect that men are paid more...
In this paper, we assess the existing archival research on audit partners and provide recommendations for future research. Our empirical analyses suggest that the audit partner characteristics with the biggest impact are industry specialization and client importance. We demonstrate that audit partner studies may suffer from omitted variable bias if...
The objective of an external audit is to provide assurance to the users of financial statements on the quality of the reported information. A quality audit is therefore essential for the functioning of capital markets. The exercise of professional skepticism is often described as a key attribute for a quality audit. However, despite its alleged imp...
Auditing standards emphasize that fraud detection is an important objective of an audit and require the exercise of professional skepticism (PS) and a discussion among the engagement team to prevent and detect fraud. The purpose of this study is to examine whether professional skepticism is a driver of fraud brainstorming quality. We investigate th...
SYNOPSIS
We investigate whether personality traits affect graduate business students' decisions to start their career (1) in the accounting profession, and (2) at a Big 4 accounting firm. Survey data (n = 348) show that students with lower levels of openness to experience are more likely to seek careers in accounting. Further, students with higher...
Al-Shaer and Harakehn (2020) and Lopatta et al. (2020) study different aspects of the relationship between board gender diversity and corporate outcomes, respectively executive compensation and non-financial performance. In this discussion, we offer a broad overview of the main results of both studies, provide some points of discussion in relations...
In this study, I investigate whether the economic bond between an individual audit engagement partner and a client threatens auditor independence (and thus audit quality). As the propensity of the auditor to issue going-concern modified audit opinions (GCOs) is lower when there is auditor independence impairment, I examine to which extent fee depen...
Audit firms can shape and foster the desired behavior of their partners in accordance with the firm's strategy and objectives through compensation schemes. Understanding financial incentives is therefore of great importance, especially to ensure that auditors actually deliver high quality work. This study analyzes the elements associated with the c...
To investigate the association between personality traits, perceived social norms, and sexual harassment in the workplace, 199 white-collar workers answered an online questionnaire (96 men, 103 women). Based on logistic regression analysis, we investigated the associations between sexual harassment behaviors in the workplace, perceived social norms...
It is common nowadays for parents to share information about their children on social network sites (SNSs). However, little is known on how adolescents think and feel about this sharenting behavior. Therefore, this study explores adolescents' perception of the reasons why parents share information about their adolescent children on SNSs, and adoles...
Becoming friends on Facebook does not always guarantee long-term friendships as users have the possibility to unfriend people. This unfriending behaviour is frequently occurring and might have negative consequences for both parties. To gain insight into the factors influencing adolescents’ unfriending, the current study made use of an extended vers...
SYNOPSIS
The accuracy of audit reports is often viewed as a signal for audit quality. Prior research shows that in the context of going-concern reporting in audit markets dominated by public firms, some auditors are more accurate than others (e.g., Big N firms). This study is the first large-scale study that investigates going-concern reporting acc...
This study is the first to examine adolescents' reasons for unfriending people on Facebook. By means of open-end questions, 419 participants described the primary online (i.e., arising from friends' behavior on Facebook) or offline (i.e., emerging from Facebook friends' offline behavior) reason for which they recently unfriended someone. Two resear...
The accuracy of audit reports is often viewed as a signal for audit quality. Prior research shows that in the context of going-concern reporting in audit markets dominated by public firms, some auditors are more accurate than others (e.g., Big N firms). This study is the first large-scale study that investigates going-concern reporting accuracy in...
This paper examines the relation between the stringency of entrance requirements to the audit profession within the European Union and audit quality. Regulators and standard setters generally believe that such entrance requirements have beneficial effects by increasing audit quality. Whether this is indeed the case, however, is an empirical questio...
Social network sites (SNSs) provide adolescents with the opportunity to expand their social circle, which is associated with increased social capital. However, the social capital adolescents built depends on the quality of their friendships on SNSs. As no instruments are available to capture the quality of friendships on SNSs, this study designed a...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the corpus of gender research in accounting journals, with the overall aim of evaluating the extent to which it has contributed to the understanding of the organization of accounting and its social and organizational functions.
Design/methodology/approach
Gender articles have been critically analy...
Regulators and standard setters emphasize professional skepticism as a key input to audit quality (e.g., AFM, 2014; PCAOB, 2015; IFIAR, 2015; IAASB, 2015). Indeed, a global recurring theme in audit inspection findings is instances in which auditors did not appropriately apply professional skepticism in their judgments and actions (IAASB, 2015). For...
Recent research indicates that there may be a relationship between the characteristics of the
audit engagement partner and audit quality. In this paper, we examine the relationship between audit quality
and the presence of a female or male audit engagement partner. We use the likelihood that an auditor issues
a going-concern opinion (GCO), conditio...
Drawing on a survey conducted among 1,743 pupils in 16 (REMOVED FOR PEER REVIEW) secondary schools, this study applies an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) to adolescents’ acceptance of friendship requests sent by online strangers on social network sites (SNSs). As demonstrated in the literature, random friending on social networking sites...
This study investigates the existence of a female audit fee premium (i.e., higher audit fees for female audit engagement partners). We analyze 57,723 firm-year observations from Belgian firms that were audited by 93 female and 599 male audit partners during the period 2008–2011. The results suggest that client firms pay higher audit fees (by about...
Addressing the scarcity of gender research in management control studies, this study examines whether CEO gender is a significant variable in explaining cross-sectional variation in management control choices after controlling for firm and industry context, for the presence of a board and for the individual CEO’s experiences. Using survey data our...
Women are still a minority in the audit profession, especially at the partner level. An increasing amount of literature has explored the sources of this gender inequality. Past studies have, however, neglected the possibility that the processes that lead to the (re)production of gender differences and hierarchies may differ between audit firms of d...
In a large-scale laboratory experiment, we investigate gender differences in overconfidence and risk taking. Our results show that (self-)selection and socialization can eliminate the gender difference in overconfidence, but they appear insufficient to create environments in which women are as risk loving as men.
In Belgium, all “large” companies are legally required to appoint a statutory auditor. The thresholds of the criteria to be considered “large” are, however, not that large. Consequently, many relative small companies in Belgium are legally required to appoint a statutory auditor. The evidence on the added value of auditing in small companies remain...
In this paper, we test the effectiveness of an expanded auditor’s report vis-à-vis an audit course in narrowing the expectations gap. We compared two auditor’s reports in a between subjects design: the ISA 700 report and an expanded auditor’s report. We also examined if explaining audits to users is (more) effective in reducing the expectations gap...
Most audit fieldwork is not conducted by a single auditor but by a team of auditors. Researchers have, however, focused heavily on the judgment and decision-making of individual auditors, ignoring the multi-person reality in which auditors have to make judgments and decisions. This study contributes to the literature by examining the performances o...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine if there exists a gender difference in overconfidence within an auditor population. Studies outside the accounting domain have found that men are more overconfident than women. It would be worthwhile to know if such a gender difference in overconfidence also exists within the auditor population. Such...
This dissertation investigates what difference (and under what circumstances) gender makes for the production of audit quality. There is much interest of both scholars and regulators for the quality of auditing to assure the credibility of companies’ financial reporting. Audit quality is ultimately determined by the behavior of auditors, which is l...
Speculation about gender differences has a long standing tradition. If it is not the size of the brains, then it is mathematical ability; if it is not impulses toward aggression, then it is interhemispheric transfer of information; if it is not preferences in types of play activities, then it is pleasure in genital sexuality. For as long as there h...
Audit quality is a much studied issue. Recently, various auditing researchers have looked at the idea that audit quality may be systematically related to the auditor being male or female. Although this seams a genuine research question, the approach adopted by these researchers (incorporating ‘sex/gender as a variable’ into the research design) is...
In this study, we investigate whether the economic bond between an individual engagement partner and a client threatens auditor independence (and thus audit quality). Using a sample of 12,556 private Belgian companies, we examine whether auditors are less likely to issue modified opinions to clients that represent a material portion of their client...
Although the proportion of women in the audit profession has increased sharply during the last quart of the 20th century, they remain to date a minority in a male-dominated profession. While an equal number of women and men have been entering the profession for over two decades, they are not progressing at the same rate to the higher levels of mana...
Previous research has hinted a potential impact of auditor gender on audit quality. It appears that, for example, men are less risk-averse than women. Female auditors may, therefore, express more severe audit opinions than male auditors. This paper addresses a potential major bias underlying the gender auditing research as it is not obvious that st...
Recent research indicates that there may be a relationship between the characteristics of the audit engagement partner and audit quality. In this paper, we examine the relationship between audit quality and the presence of a female or male audit engagement partner. We use the likelihood that an auditor issues a going-concern opinion (GCO), conditio...
Auditors add credibility to the financial statements of their clients, but only insofar as the users of those financial statements perceive the audit as valuable. Audit quality should therefore not only be looked at from the perspective of ‘actual audit quality’ (the reduction of audit risk to an acceptable low level) but also from the perspective...