Hanwen Chen, Liquan Xing and Haiyan Zhou
Product market competition may have various impacts on audit fees. On the one hand, according to the agency theory, product market competition can mitigate agency problems between…
Abstract
Purpose
Product market competition may have various impacts on audit fees. On the one hand, according to the agency theory, product market competition can mitigate agency problems between management and shareholders. For clients with higher product market competition, auditors will lower the level of engagement risk assessment and reduce the required level of audit evidence, and hence audit fees will be lower. On the other hand, according to the audit risk model, product market competition will increase client business risk and audit engagement risk. Moreover, for clients with competition advantage, client business risk and audit engagement risk will be lower, and hence a lower audit fee. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors collect financial accounting data and audit fee data from CSMAR database. Our sample selection starts with all available observations on the Chinese listed companies during 2006–2011. Since there is a big difference in accounting practices between financial companies and other industries, the authors delete observations on financial companies. The authors further remove observations with missing data, yielding 6,709 observations for the final analysis. To define the industry, the authors use the first two digits of standard industry classification code set by China Securities Regulatory Commission. In order to reduce the effect of extreme observations, the authors also truncate the data at 1 and 99 percent. The authors use the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) and the natural logarithm of the number of listed companies within the industry to measure product market competition intensity. HHI is calculated as the sum of the squared percentage of revenues of the client firm among the total revenues of all public companies, i.e.
Findings
Using a sample of 6,709 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market for the period of 2007–2011, the authors find that the product market competition intensity has a negative impact on audit fees, which means that agency cost effect is dominant in audit pricing at industry level. In addition, a company’s competitive advantage in the industry has a significant and negative impact on audit fees, which means that business risk effect also plays a critical role in audit pricing of individual engagement. The findings indicate that, in determining audit fees, auditors in the emerging market of China consider both the competition intensity of their clients’ product market at the industry level and the competitive advantage of the specific clients within the industry.
Originality/value
The findings indicate that, in determining audit fees, auditors in the emerging market of China consider both the competition intensity of their clients’ product market at the industry level and the competitive advantage of the specific clients within the industry.