The economic consequences of auditor industry specialization.

This paper examines the association between the employment of industry specialist auditors, and the degree of information asymmetry and the cost of debt of a client company. Unlike auditors without industry expertise, auditors with industry expertise can better improve the credibility of financial statements (Krishnan 2003; Balsam et al. 2003) and verify management forecasts, thereby minimizing management's discretion in applying accounting principles and standards (Kwon 1996). This suggests that industry specialist auditors can enhance audit quality. Consequently, clients of industry specialist auditors are expected to achieve more significant economic benefits than clients of nonspecialist auditors. Based on product differentiation theory and signaling theory, it is hypothesized in this study that clients of industry specialist auditors are more likely to enjoy a lower level of information asymmetry and a lower cost of debt than clients of nonindustry specialist auditors. In addition, this study hypothesizes that the marginal economic value added by auditor industry specialization varies between financially troubled clients and financially healthy clients that seek external financing. The results indicate that clients of specialists experience a lower information asymmetry level than clients of nonspecialists. This economic value provided by specialists is important and more pronounced for unregulated firms than for regulated firms. This inference, however, does not hold when information asymmetry is measured using analyst forecast dispersion. In addition, clients hiring specialists enjoy better credit ratings and lower cost of debt than clients of nonspecialists, and this economic value is more significant for financially troubled firms than for financially healthy firms. However, these findings do not hold for each proxy of auditor industry specialization.