Yi Luo is an Assistant Professor in Managerial Accounting and Control at the Ivey Business School. She obtained her Ph.D. in social and behavioural Accounting from Queen’s University and Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) from University of Toronto (St. George). Her research focuses on policy-relevant questions, such as assessing the effectiveness of audit standard setters and regulators, understanding how auditors respond to unpredicted shocks, and examining whether gender plays a role in investors’ equity investment decisions, among others.
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Luo, Y.; Malsch, B., 2023, "Re-Examining Auditability through Auditors’ Responses to COVID-19: Roles and Limitations of Improvisation on the Production of Auditing Knowledge", Auditing-A Journal of Practice & Theory, August 42(3): 155 - 175.
Abstract: Drawing on Power’s theorization of the logic of auditability as a multidimensional system (Power 1996), we examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on auditors’ year-end work from January to April 2020. Based on 24 semistructured interviews with auditing and accounting professionals located in China, we find that all four dimensions of the logic of auditability were destabilized at once. To restore the conditions of auditability during the pandemic, auditors improvised a deviant system of audit knowledge by rearranging the timeline of audit procedures, altering the substance of audit processes, and designing alternative control mechanisms. As the audit profession continues to evolve and more institutional decomposition (or reconfiguration) of the logic of auditability is expected to occur, this study contributes to our understanding of how auditors improvise in the backstage and produce comfort when they have to operate outside the protective umbrella of legitimate processes during sudden change of circumstances.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2308/ajpt-2020-114
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Hoang, K.; Luo, Y.; Salterio, S. E., 2022, "Evidence‐Informed Audit Standard Setting: Exploring Evidence Use and Knowledge Transfer", Contemporary Accounting Research, November 39(4): 2243 - 2283.
Abstract: The authors acknowledge ongoing support for this research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (grant number 430-2015-0165), and Salterio acknowledges support from the Stephen J. R. Smith Chair. We thank workshop participants at the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland for comments on an early draft of this paper, as well as participants at the 2020 AAA Auditing Section Mid-Year Meeting, 2021 BAFA Audit & Assurance Conference, and Egyptian Online Seminars in Business, Accounting and Economics. In particular, we thank Wai Fong Chua, Kerry Humphreys, Justin Leiby (discussant), and Ken Trotman for detailed comments. We thank the Netherlands-based Foundation for Audit Research for allowing the third author to present some of these ideas at the closing plenary of the Third International Audit Research Conference. We also presented some of the initial findings of this paper through video format at the 2018 Illinois Symposium on Audit Research. We thank the members of the Smith Social and Behavioral Brownbag for numerous comments on this research program. We appreciate the assistance of former IAASB board members and staff, PCAOB and SEC academic fellows, and PCAOB-AAA Auditing Section synthesis project members for input; however, we note that the analysis and conclusions are our own and should not be attributed to them.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.12795
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Luo, Y.; Salterio, S. E., 2022, "The Effect of Gender on Investors’ Judgments and Decision-Making", Journal of Business Ethics, August 179(1): 237 - 258.
Abstract: We examine whether an unsophisticated investor’s own gender interacts with gender of a sell-side equity analyst to affect the investor’s judgment. Prior research shows two potential sources of gender-based discrimination that affect female investors. First, female investors’ advisors offer less risky hence lower return portfolios to female investors than to male investors with similar risk preferences as female investors are perceived as more risk adverse. Second, female equity analysts are subject to greater barriers to enter and advance in investment firms that act as if they believe clients prefer male investment advisors in a male stereotypical occupation. Using two experiments, we use the judge-advisor framework to predict and find that investor’s gender and analyst’s gender jointly influence investor’s judgment. Specifically, female-female analyst-investor pair generates the strongest reaction to analyst’s advice compared to any other analyst-investor pair, everything else equal. Further, we find that efforts to highlight equal gender performance activates gender stereotypes that reduce female investors’ receptivity to female analysts’ advice. By linking the two previously different sources of discrimination we show that they reinforce each other and find that attempts to “level the playing field” by emphasizing gender performance parity may have unexpected results.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04806-3
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Salterio, S. E.; Hoang, K.; Luo, Y., 2021, "Communication is a two-way street: Analyzing practices undertaken to systematically transfer audit research knowledge to policymakers", Accounting, Organizations and Society, October 94: 101265 - 101265.
Abstract: Audit academics and policymakers express ongoing concerns about limited knowledge transfer between audit research and policymaking. We use theory-based knowledge transfer norms to evaluate eight practices used by audit academics to transfer research knowledge to policymakers. The discontinued PCAOB-AAA Auditing Section “Research Synthesis Project” came closest to enacting these theory-based knowledge transfer norms. Hence, we examine why those involved in that project did not follow these norms. Interviews with project authors reveal that their review creation approach anchored on the traditional academic literature review, and insufficiently adjusted it to meet the goal of communicating audit research evidence to policymakers. However, interviews with PCAOB project liaisons indicate that policymakers were engaged with and found value in the review creation process. Thus, we analyze PCAOB rulemaking documents for evidence that policymakers valued and used the project’s reviews in their policymaking. Over the project’s duration, we find increasing citations of research to the reviews themselves and to a broader set of academic research. Our findings of knowledge transfer occurrence in this project warrant further research on the efficacy of mobilizing audit research via research syntheses. We also show how several current audit domain knowledge transfer practices can be combined with the research syntheses approach leading to systematic effective knowledge transfer to policymakers.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2021.101265
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