TY  - CHAP
AB  - The extant literature has established that industry-specialist auditors gain performance-enhancing industry-specific sub-specialty knowledge (e.g., Solomon, Shields, & Whittington, 1999) via training and on the job experience. This knowledge has been shown to allow specialists to outperform non-specialists on a range of industry-specific tasks. The current study extends this line of research by comparing and contrasting the relative performance gains enjoyed by industry-specialist auditors in two different industry settings, one regulated and the other unregulated. When specializing in regulated industries, auditors gain very detailed industry-specific knowledge which is not the case for specialists in unregulated industries (Dunn & Mayhew, 2004). By comparing industry-specialists to non-specialists with matching industry-based experience, this study measures the relative benefits of specialization in different industry settings, rather than the benefits of specialization per se, which has been well established in the literature. This study finds that the performance gains made by regulated industry-specialists significantly outweigh those made by unregulated industry-specialists on industry-specific tasks. The implications of these results for future research and practice are explored in the body of the chapter.
VL  - 11
SN  - 978-1-84663-961-6, 978-1-84663-960-9/1475-1488
DO  - 10.1016/S1475-1488(08)11003-1
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1016/S1475-1488(08)11003-1
AU  - Dowling Carlin
AU  - Moroney Robyn
ED  - Vicky Arnold
ED  - B. Douglas Clinton
ED  - Anne Lillis
ED  - Robin Roberts
ED  - Chris Wolfe
ED  - Sally Wright
PY  - 2008
Y1  - 2008/01/01
TI  - Auditor performance variation: impact of sub-specialty knowledge differences between industry-specialists
T2  - Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research
T3  - Advances in Accounting Behavioural Research
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 59
EP  - 79
Y2  - 2024/04/24
ER  -