Evidence of Industry Scale Effects on Audit Hours, Billing Rates and Pricing
利用比利时一家四大会计师事务所2000年所有私企审计数据，发现审计师行业规模带来效率提升（减少总工时、合伙人及员工工时），且效率完全传导至客户，但审计师市场力量会削弱这种传导。
Using a proprietary dataset consisting of all private firm audit engagements in 2000 from one Big 4 firm in Belgium, we investigate: (1) whether audit office industry scale is associated with a reduction of total, partner and staff audit hours and thus with efficiency gains triggered by organizational learning from servicing more clients in an industry; and (2) whether the extent of efficiency pass‐on from the auditor to its clients depends on the audit firm's market power. We find that auditor office industry scale is associated with efficiency gains and a reduction of the variable costs (i.e., fewer total audit hours, partner hours, and staff hours), ceteris paribus. Our results also suggest that, on average, realized efficiencies are entirely passed on as evidenced by a non‐significant effect of auditor industry scale on the auditor's billing rate. Furthermore, we find that the extent of the efficiency pass‐on decreases with the market power of the audit firm in the industry market segment as we document a higher billing rate for auditors with high market power (versus low market power). In addition, we find that the lower audit hours associated with auditor industry scale do not compromise audit quality.