Abstract

Many European countries have abolished mandatory audits for small firms to reduce the regulatory and administrative burden for these firms. However, we still lack knowledge on whether such legislative changes affect employment growth for those firms that become free to choose to have external audits. We investigate this question using a Swedish reform that made audits voluntary for small firms fulfilling certain requirements. The reform created an almost ideal natural experiment, which we use to evaluate the effects of voluntary audits on employment growth for small firms using a difference-in-difference estimator. We find that firms which fulfilled the requirements for voluntary auditing, compared to a control group of similar firms that did not, increased their employment growth rate by 0.59%. This corresponds to 2,770 jobs being created in the year following the reform, suggesting that mandatory audits act as a growth barrier for small firms.

摘要

许多欧洲国家取消了对小公司的强制性审核，以减轻这些公司的监管和行政负担。但是，对于那些可以自由选择接受外部审计的公司，我们仍然不知道这种立法变化是否会影响就业增长。我们使用瑞典的一项改革对这一问题进行了调查，该改革使符合某些要求的小型公司自愿进行审计。这项改革创造了一个几乎理想的自然实验，我们可以使用差异估计法来评估自愿性审计对小企业就业增长的影响。我们发现，与未进行自愿审计的要求相比，符合条件的公司与未提供审计服务的类似公司的对照组相比，其就业增长率提高了0.59％。这对应于2