Auditor Industry Specialization And Earnings Quality
Steven Balsam,Jagan Krishnan,and Joon S. Yang
SUMMARY : This study examines the association between measures of earnings quality and auditor industry specialization. Prior work has examined the association between auditor brand name and earnings quality,using auditor brand name to proxy for audit quality.Recent work has hypothesized that auditor industry specialization also contributes to audit quality. Extending this literature, we compare the absolute level of discretionary specialist with those of firms not audited by industry specialists. We restrict our study to clients of Big 6 (and later Big 5) Auditors to control for brand name. Becaure industry specialization is unobservable, we use multiple proxies for it. After controlling of variables established in prior work to be related DAC and the ERC, we find clients cialist auditors. This finding is consistent with clients of industry specialists having higher earnings quality than clients of nonspecialists.
Keywords: industry specialization; discretionary accruals; earnings response coefficient; audit quality.
Data Availability: Data are publicly available from sources identified in the paper.
INTRODUCTION
The 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 Weil 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 et ai.1998;Reynolds and Francis 2000). Other researchers (Craswell et al.1995;Beasley and Petroni 2001) have hypothesized that, in addition to brand name