TBE¼binary variable where 1 equals task-based experience; and
AE¼log of years of audit experience.
If b1is greater than b2, then industry-based experience has a greater impact on performance
than task-based experience and H1 is supported.
The variable PERFORMANCE is measured as the degree of completeness of each
participant’s solution when compared to the solution provided by the expert panel. Each participant’s solution was blind-coded by two expert coders by comparing it to the model solution.
Coders identified whether the participant’s solution contained each element of the expert panel
solution. Cohen’s Kappa (Cohen 1960) was 0.9389 for the manufacturing case and 0.9281 for the
superannuation case (both significant at p ,0.001). The greater the consistency between a
participant’s answer and the model solution, the higher the participant’sPERFORMANCEscore
(to a maximum of 10).
Industry-based experience was measured by asking participants to‘‘Please list the proportion of
your time over this last year that you spent auditing clients in different industry settings. For
example: Insurance (10%), Retail (30%), Superannuation (50%), and Financial Services (10%),’’
totaling 100%for the year (following the procedure used inBonner and Lewis [1990]andBedard
and Biggs [1991a]). The data for industry-based experience are highly skewed because 90 of the
166 responses reported having no industry-based experience (see discussion in next section). The
present analysis therefore uses the binary variableIBE to measure industry-based experience.
The binary variableIBEallows us to present some interesting descriptive statistics for auditors
with or without industry-based experience. In the‘‘Results’’ section we report the outcome using the
binary measure of industry-based experience in the main analysis and the continuous measure,
extent of industry-based experience, as a footnote. This analysis allows us to conduct a more
complete analysis of the impact of industry-based experience on auditor performance.