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in civil and criminal cases against ,our results imply that ownership concentration will subside by 35%and 31%,respectively,with a one standard deviation reduction in the variables representing the burden of proof in civil and criminal litigation in our Moreover,we find in multivariate tests that these provisions that subject auditors to more severe private and public enforcement dominate other legal and extralegal institutional factors in explaining ownership ,reestimating our regressions on a broad sample of western European public firms provides similar evidence on all of our predictions. Collectively, we interpret our research as implying that investors value legal institutions that discipline auditors in the event of financial reporting failure over both auditor choice and better disclosure In documenting the sobering impact of civil and criminal litigation on auditors’ incentives to constrain insiders’discretion over the financial reporting process,our evidence plements recent international research that finds that institutions that affect managers’incentives matter more than formal disclosure standards to accounting quality,for example,Ball,Robin,and Wu[2020],Francis,Khurana,and Pereira[2020],and Haw et al.[2020].Our results also corroborate evidence in LLSV[1997]and DeFond and Hung [2020]that a strong surrounding enforcement infrastructure is more important to good corporate governance than extensive investor protection laws. In contrast to Dyck and Zingales[2020]and Haw et al.[2020],we find that the severity of tax enforcement does not influence ownership concentration,our proxy for the amount of insiders’private control ,our research suggests that governance reforms meant to alleviate the agency conflict between controlling shareholders and outside investors should focus on lowering the burden of proof in both civil and criminal cases against firms’auditors and,to a lesser extent,requiring more ,these policy prescriptions are relatively straightforward for governments to implement in order to improve their securities fact,such feasible reforms should enhance the quality of financial reporting,leading to the positive externality of higher tax pliance since preventing diversion of corporate resources benefits tax authorities as well as outside investors. The remainder of the paper proceeds as 2 develops our testable 3 describes the sample and reports summary descriptive statistics on the regression 4 discusses the empirical 5 concludes. However,we mainly contribute to our understanding of international corporate governance by responding to Ball’s[2020]and Leuz’s[2020]calls for research that sheds light on whether legal institutions that discipline auditors lead to firms being better known in the capital particular,we estimate the influence of differences across countries in the burden of proof required in civil and criminal cases against auditors on ownership evidence implies that governments that genuinely expose auditors to civil and criminal penalties benefit from firms having more dispersed ownership,suggesting that minority investors perceive that firms’financial statements are more credible in these ,in multivariate tests,we find that securities laws that facilitate civil and criminal litigation against auditors subsume the influence of oth