No abstract

This study examines whether and how the Big 3 audit firms in Japan respond to clients' business risk and whether their responses vary. Two possible approaches to addressing clients' higher business risk are increasing audit effort (e.g., increasing total audit hours or assigning more experienced staff to the audit team) and charging a risk premium to cover possible future losses without increasing audit effort. Although the auditing standards and audit fee determination guidelines issued by the Japanese audit profession apparently assume that an auditor chooses the first approach to respond to clients' high business risk, the approach adopted by each Big 3 firm is an empirical issue. By analyzing data on audits conducted by the Big 3 Japanese firms using structural equation modeling and ordinary least squares regression, we find that responses to clients' higher business risk vary among the firms. While two of the firms increase audit effort and charge a risk premium for audits with higher business risk, the third firm responds to clients' business risk only by increasing audit effort. In addition, the strength of the relationships between clients' business risk and audit effort/fees varies among the firms.

No abstract

No abstract

Aspartic proteinase from Laetiporus sulphureus was purified by sequential chromatographies on Sephadex G-100, DEAE-Sepharose Fast Flow, and Butyl-Toyopearl 650S. The final preparation was judged homogeneous by SDS-PAGE. The molecular mass of the purified enzyme was estimated to be 50,000 and the isoelectric point of the enzyme was 3.5. The enzyme was most active at pH 2.6 and was inhibited completely by a specific aspartic proteinase inhibitor, pepstatin A. The enzyme was extremely labile as compared to other milk-clotting enzymes and N-terminal amino acid sequence of the enzymes was closely related to that from a basidiomycete, Irpex lacteus. Comparison of substrate specificities of milk-clotting enzymes on ␣s1-and ␤-casein indicated that ␤-casein is a suitable substrate for identifying the specificities of these enzymes, because these enzymes showed different specificity on ␤-casein but similar specificity on ␣s1-casein.