Audit partner industry specialization and audit quality: evidence from Spain

Abstract

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.