INTRODUCTION
he role of auditing in ensuring the quality of corporate earnings has come under considerable scrutiny due to recent earnings restatements and the collapse of Enron (Browning and Wei! 2002). Audit quality differences result in variation in credibility offered by auditors, and in
the earnings quality of their clients. Because auditor quality is multidimensional and inherently unobservable, there is no single auditor characteristic that can be used to proxy for it. Most prior work has used auditor brand name to proxy for audit quality and examined the association between brand name and earnings quality (Becker eta!. 1998; Reynolds and Francis 2000). Other researchers (Craswell eta!. 1995; Beasley and Petroni 2001) have hypothesized that, in addition to brand name,an audit or 's industry spec i a li z ati on con tri b utes po siti ve l y to the cr edibilit y offered by th e audit or . Some ev idence of indu str y spec iali st s prod u c in g m ore effecti ve audits i s prov ided by Ow h oso et a l. (2002). R ecent stru ctur a l shi fts by a udit fi rm s in th e direction of greater indu stry focu s a l so su ggest that indu stry speciali za ti on m ay pla y a n i n creasingl y important rol e in a ud i t quality (Hoga n a nd Jet er 1999; Solomon et al. 1999) .