Balasingham Balachandran

1 INTRODUCTION The recent spate of corporate scandals and the global financial crisis has led to an increasing emphasis on the role of the auditor and the integrity of financial information. The increasingly important role of auditors has motivated several studies to examine the determinants of audit fees (e.g., see Hay, 2013; Hay et al., 2006; I. Kim et al., 2024; Nekhili et al., 2020; Tan, 2021).

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1 INTRODUCTION Since the recent financial crisis, there has been considerable research interest in examining the factors determining firm default risk (Bennett et al., 2015; Brogaard et al., 2017; Bruyland & De Maeseneire, 2016; Giesecke et al., 2011; Hsu et al., 2015) and estimating the cost of default (Davydenko et al., 2012; Glover, 2016).