Does Auditor Industry Specialization Improve Audit Quality?
研究了审计师行业市场份额衡量的行业专长是否提升审计质量并带来费用溢价，匹配样本后未发现审计质量差异或一致的费用溢价证据，表明市场份额并非可靠的质量指标。
ABSTRACT This study examines whether auditor industry specialization, measured using the auditor's within‐industry market share, improves audit quality and results in a fee premium. After matching clients of specialist and nonspecialist auditors on a number of dimensions, as well as only on industry and size, there is no evidence of differences in commonly used audit‐quality proxies between these two groups of auditors. Moreover, there is no consistent evidence of a specialist fee premium. The matched sample results are confirmed by including client fixed effects in the main models, examining a sample of clients that switched auditors, and using an alternative proxy that aims to capture the auditor's industry knowledge. The combined evidence in this study suggests that the auditor's within‐industry market share is not a reliable indicator of audit quality. Nevertheless, these findings do not imply that industry knowledge is not important for auditors, but that the methodology used in extant archival studies to examine this issue does not fully parse out the effects of auditor industry specialization from client characteristics.