【正文】
t provides reasonable assurance, irrespective of the e?ectiveness of a pany’ s internal control. Even when an auditor provides an unquali?ed opinion on ?nancial statements, users may view an adverse opinion on internal controls as bad news. William McDonough, former Chairman of the PCAOB, suggests that it is unclear how the marketplace will react when the auditor expresses an adverse opinion on internal control and a clean opinion on ?nancial statements (CFO, 2021). A handful of archival studies examine the e?ect of internal control disclosures on stock prices, with most of them ?nding negative market reactions to the reporting of material weaknesses (., Whisenant et al., 2021。 De Franco et al., 2021。 AshbaughSkaife et al., forthing。 AshbaughSkaife et al., 2021a) ?nd that most disclosures of material weaknesses are announced by weaker panies and are acpanied by restatements, restructuring, and other bad news. While these studies attempt to control for such problems with selfselection control procedures, the controls are likely insu?cient. Hence, an experimental approach is extremely useful to overe these problems. We carefully craft two cases in which the auditor’ s opinion on internal controls is the only di?erence in the information presented. Archival ?ndings are mixed as to the e?ect of internal control disclosures on the cost of equity. AshbaughSkaife et al. (2021b) suggest that the disclosure of internal control weaknesses is associated with a higher cost of equity. Ogneva et al. (2021) ?nd that, after controlling for ?rmspeci?c characte