We also test whether firms that hire industry specialized auditors are different from
others. We divide the full sample into three groups based on the degree of auditor industry
specialization. We first rank all the observations based on the value of ISPEC and select
the 25 percent of observations that have the highest value of ISPEC. These are the firmyear
observations that hire industry expert auditors and we label them ‘‘expert auditors.’’
Similarly, we select the 25 percent of observations that have the lowest value of ISPEC.
These firms are those who hire non-industry experts and we label them ‘‘non-specialized
auditors.’’ The remaining 50 percent of the firms that do not belong to either group are
labeled ‘‘other auditors.’’