In our study, we focus on the post-2007 PCAOB censures of US Big 4 firms. In censuring auditors,the PCAOB imposes monetary penalties but perhaps more importantly attempts to ‘name and shame’ the censured firms in an attempt at incentivizing them to improve audit quality. To the extent that PCAOB censures convey new information about impaired audit quality, the censures may be expected to hurt the reputations of the censured firms and result in the loss of investor and/or audit committee confidence in the censured firm’s audit quality.