Comment and Response to “Do Client Characteristics Really Drive the Big N Audit Quality Effect? New Evidence from Propensity Score Matching” by Mark DeFond, David H. Erkens, and Jieying Zhang

This discussion presents the comments by the authors of Lawrence et al. [Lawrence A, Minutti-Meza M, Zhang P (2011) Can Big 4 versus non-Big 4 differences in audit-quality proxies be attributed to client characteristics? Accounting Rev. 86(1):259–286] to the critique of their study in DeFond et al. [DeFond M, Erkens DH, Zhang Z (2017) Do client characteristics really drive the Big N audit quality effect? New evidence from propensity score matching. Management Sci. 63(11):3628–3649] and response by the authors of the latter study.

This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan served as the editor for this article.