As the leader of an audit team, the audit partner can have a significant impact on the outcomes of an audit engagement. One hitherto unexplored aspect of partner assignments to audits is cases where they handle clients in multiple audit offices. I examine factors associated with the assignment of audit partners to multiple offices (henceforth multi-office partners or MOPs) and the implications of such assignments for audit quality. I document that audit firms assign partners to multiple offices to match partner expertise to client needs and to manage resource constraints in audit offices. Specifically, partners specializing in the financial sector, who report more skills on LinkedIn profiles, and have more professional experience, are more likely to be MOPs. Audit offices with fewer partner resources are more likely to share partners among the network of offices to mitigate resource constraints. In the audit quality analyses, I find that MOPs are, on average, associated with an increased likelihood of restatements, suggesting the negative impact of audit office resource constraints dominates the positive influence of partner expertise on audit quality. The negative effect of MOPs on audit quality exists for both local and non-local clients and is concentrated in MOPs who (1) are not industry specialists, (2) face greater information friction as the distance between different audit offices increases, and (3) have limited knowledge-sharing opportunities from audit offices. / Business Administration/Accounting

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With rapidly advancing technologies and digital innovations, companies face the need to adapt to the new digital world and to digitally transform their business models. For executing the digital transformation process, more and more companies decide to entrust a new C-level manager with all challenges and complexity arising from digital transformation, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). As the CDO position is still fairly new, research in this field is limited and requires further attention by scholars. Therefore, this study aims to address three fundamental research questions concerning the nature of the CDO position and corresponding implications not only to inform practitioners but also to enrich the scholarly discussion on CDOs. By understanding existing literature on CDOs based on a systematic literature review, this thesis answers the first research question regarding what characterizes the CDO position. Building on these insights and drawing from a comprehensive theoretical framework consisting of upper echelons theory, contingency theory, human capital theory and the resource-based view, hypotheses are developed for answering research questions two and three. While the second research question focuses on factors, which influence CDO presence within a company, the third research question addresses the impact of a CDO on company performance. Based on a large-scale sample of panel data comprised of S&P 500 companies, generalized estimating equations models, propensity score matching and fixed effects regression models are exploited in order to derive answers for both research questions two and three. As influencing factors for CDO presence, the results show that especially early tenure CEOs and CEOs of larger companies are more likely to employ a CDO. Although no evidence can be observed for positive performance implications of CDOs, also given different company contingencies, the insights of this study's analyses show that certain CDO characteristics as well as in combination with CIO presence and varying CEO characteristics are more favorable over others in terms of company performance measured by return on assets and Tobin's Q.