We extend this literature by comparing the earnings quality of clients of industry specialist and non specialist auditors. Earnings quality is a concept that does not have a common definition in the literature, Rather, the extant literature uses various measures to capture different manifestations of quality of earnings. Following this literature, we examine the effect of auditor specialization on :
(1) the absolute level of discretionary accruals (DAC) and
(2) earnings response coefficients (ERC).
We expect that, if auditors' industry specialization results in greater audit quality, industry specialization would be negatively associated with clients' DAC and positively associated with clients' ERC. We restrict our study to clients of Big 6 (and later Bis5) auditors to control for brand name.