Audit Market Concentration and Audit Fees: An International Investigation

[Purpose] Several large auditor consolidations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with Arthur Andersen’s collapse in 2001, facilitated concentration in the global audit market. Subsequently, regulators have expressed serious concerns regarding the potential detrimental effects of this market concentration, including potential cartel pricing by dominant large auditors. However, several practitioners and academics do not agree with such concerns. To provide answers for such controversies, our study investigates the association between audit market concentration and audit fees. [Methodology] We use international data from 25 countries and proxy for audit market concentration using the Herfindahl index. [Findings] Our study yields two principal findings. First, there is, on average, no significant association between audit market concentration and audit fees. Second, a country’s legal regime changes this association dramatically: while the association is significantly positive in countries with a weak legal regime, it becomes weaker and eventually turns negative as the legal regime becomes stronger. [Implications] These findings will provide regulators and other stakeholders with important insights into the effects of audit market structure on audit pricing.