Business Commons^™

The Effect Of Audit Market Concentration On Audit Pricing And Audit Quality : The Role Of The Size Of The Audit Market, John Daniel Eshleman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The GAO has recently expressed concern that audit market concentration (i.e., not client concentration) could result in greater audit fees and lower audit quality. However, the extant literature finds that local audit markets with higher concentration have lower audit fees (Numan and Willekens 2012) and fewer accounting restatements (Newton et al. 2013). In this study, I show that the effect of audit market concentration on the level of audit fees depends on the size of the audit market (i.e., the size and/or number of clients in the local geographic area). When the audit market contains fewer clients and/or those clients …