Recent concern has been expressed regarding accounting firms reducing the quality of their assurance services (statutory audit and other assurance services) to gain cross‐selling opportunities. While prior studies have focused on the quality of statutory audits, our study examines the quality of other assurance services, in the form of independent expert opinions provided to target firms in Australian takeovers. Specifically, this setting allows us to observe any dissent or consensus in opinions between the accounting firms and their clients regarding the fairness of a takeover offer price, the quality of the independent expert report (valuation range), and fees charged for their services. Our results are inconsistent with accounting firms providing lower quality independent expert reports. However, non–Big 4 accounting firms charge lower fees for their independent expert reports compared to other providers, consistent with potential incentives to cross‐sell future services.

中文翻译：

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会计师事务所提供的其他鉴证服务的质量：来自独立专家报告的证据

最近有人表示担心，会计公司会降低其担保服务（法定审计和其他担保服务）的质量，以获取交叉销售的机会。虽然先前的研究集中在法定审计的质量上，但我们的研究以向澳大利亚收购中的目标公司提供的独立专家意见的形式，检查了其他鉴证服务的质量。具体而言，此设置使我们能够观察到会计师事务所与客户之间关于收购要约价格的公平性，独立专家报告的质量（评估范围）以及为其服务收取的费用的意见或共识。我们的结果与提供较低质量的独立专家报告的会计师事务所不一致。然而，