دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تخصص صنعتی شریک حسابرس و کیفیت حسابرسی: شواهدی از اسپانیا - وایلی 2017

We investigate the impact of the industry specialization of individual auditors on audit quality. We aim to contribute to a quickly growing line of research examining the importance of audit partners as determinants of audit quality. To provide robust results, we use several proxies of both industry specialization and audit quality. We conduct the empirical analysis with a sample of Spanish listed companies for the research period between 2005 and 2013. Our main result is the lack of a significant impact of the industry specialization of audit partners on audit quality. This result seems sound, as it holds for the several measures of industry specialization and audit quality used in the empirical study. Our main result, which contradicts most of the scarce available evidence, would stress the importance of the institutional context in the study of the industry specialization–audit quality relationship and advocates the need for further research.

5 | CONCLUDING REMARKS

The main result of this study is that the industry specialization of individual auditors does not show a significant impact on audit quality. Neither the level of discretionary accruals of auditors' clients nor the likelihood of a modified opinion in the audit report are significantly affected by the level of industry specialization of lead audit partners. This result appears to be robust, as it holds independently of how industry specialization or audit quality are measured. Overall, our results appear to contradict most previous studies which agree on a positive impact of the industry specialization of lead partners on audit quality. It should be noted, however, that according to Audousset‐Coulier et al. (2016), because of the diversity of research settings (i.e., countries, research periods, and model specifications), it is difficult to compare the results reported by different studies.

The evidence reported here might be of interest for several reasons. First, as our results oppose those obtained in other audit markets, they stress the importance of the research setting and encourage further research, particularly on countries not investigated so far. Moreover, it should be noted that the available research is not only scarce but also heavily concentrated on the Taiwanese audit market. Therefore, we adhere to Bedard's (2012) claim encouraging further research in other jurisdictions that currently require (or will require in the future) the signature of lead audit partners on the audit report. Second, although our results might put into question the actual role of the individual auditor in the quality of the audit services provided, we do not consider that this is the case, given the quickly growing amount of evidence supporting the important role of audit partners as a determinant of audit quality. Third, at a more practical level, the lack of significant effects of the industry specialization of audit partners indicates that audit firms do not face strong incentives to promote the specialization of partners at the industry level, as specialized partners do not seem to provide higher quality audit services.