The Effect of Auditor Industry Specialization on Audit Pricing in Belgium

Wouter Dutillieux and Marleen Willekens

Review of Business and Economic Literature, 2009, vol. LIV, issue 2, 129-146

Abstract: Recent studies have documented that auditor industry specialization is associated with higher audit fees for public firms in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. This paper uses a unique dataset that consists of all audit engagements for the year 2004 to examine this issue in Belgium. We document that in addition to a general Big 4 brand name premium there is a premium for industry specialization. Above that, specialization leads to higher audit fees for both Big 4 specialists and non-Big 4 specialists. We contribute to the literature by documenting the existence of audit fee premiums for industry specialization in the nonlisted client segment of the audit market, while previous research focused on the listed client segment. In additional analyses we show that the largest audit clients do not pay fee premiums for specialization, which could be an indication of their greater bargaining power.

Keywords: auditor industry specialization; private client segment; audit fees; Belgium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/274 ... icing+in+Belgium.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:revbec:20090202

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Business and Economic Literature from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Review of Business and Economic Literature Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().