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 contrib utes to audit quality. Extending this literature, we compare the absolute level of discre tionary accruals (DAG) and earnings response coefficients (ERG) of firms audited by industry specialists 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. Because industry specialization is unobservable, we use multiple proxies for it. After controlling for variables established in prior work to be related to DAG and the ERG, we find clients of industry specialist auditors have lower DAG and higher ERG than clients of nonspe cialist auditors. This finding is consistent with clients of industry specialists having higher earnings quality than clients of nonspecialists.