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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of auditor specialization, at both the partner and office levels, on audit quality within a developed market (the USA).

This study exploits the environment created when several large accounting firms purchased select Andersen offices following the firm's demise in 2002. OLS regressions were estimated from a sample of companies that assumingly followed their Andersen partner to the purchased accounting firm to examine the association between abnormal discretionary accruals and auditor specialization at both the office and partner levels.

The descriptive statistics and regression results show a significant negative relation between audit partner specialization and abnormal accruals. Furthermore, the results suggest that partner level specialization has a greater effect on audit quality than that of office level specialization.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the effects of auditor specialization at both the office and partner levels on audit quality within a developed market. The results of this study should be of interest to academics, investors, and regulators and help them in their assessments of auditor quality.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of industry specialization of audit partners and audit committee members on the level of tax avoidance in Australian banks.

This study uses a multivariate regression analysis based on hand-collected data consisting of 180 observations from Australian domestic banks between 2010 and 2018.

The primary results of the empirical analysis indicate that audit partner industry specialization is negatively associated with the level of tax avoidance in Australian banks. Regarding the audit committee, the proportion of industry specialists among audit committee members reduces the magnitude of tax avoidance. These results are robust, as they hold the same for alternative measures of tax avoidance and industry specialization of audit partner and audit committee members. Results from supplementary analysis reveal that the interactive effect of both audit firm and audit partner industry specialization strengthens the auditors’ effectiveness in reducing the level of tax avoidance.

As this study highlights the importance of the industry specialization in decreasing tax avoidance, it can be beneficial for policymakers to assess the impact of good governance on the level of tax avoidance in the banking industry.

Even though the existing studies examine the link between the governance actors’ industry specialization and tax avoidance in nonfinancial firms, this paper explores the banking industry that differs from nonfinancial firms in among others; accounting and fiscal regulations. This study further provides unique evidence indicating that industry specialization of the audit partner constitutes a significant determinant of minimizing the bank’s level of tax avoidance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the endogenous relationship between production specialisation and market commercialisation with an empirical study of farmers in Northwest China.

The three-stage least squares were used to address simultaneity and over-identification problems in comparison with two-stage least squares (2SLS). The Durbin-Wu-Hausman test was employed to identify the endogeneity of the commercialisation and specialisation variables. The validity, relevance, and strength of the instruments were tested using the Stock-Yogo weak instrument diagnostics test.

A two-way interrelationship between specialisation and commercialisation were confirmed, and suggest that farmers’ decisions on farm commercialisation and production specialisation are actually separate and interacting.

By demonstrating that a virtuous cycle exists between agricultural commercialisation and on-farm specialisation, policies can be formulated to complement these two effects that may help increase small holders’ income. Farmers’ market participation can be indirectly improved by combining market improvement and risk management tools to encourage production specialisation.

The insights of this study cast further light onto the farm market participation theory by emphasising that higher asset endowments enable small farmers to specialise in production with comparative advantage.

This study aims to investigate the implications of audit industry specialization on auditor’s retention and growth within an emerging economy. Factors such as whether the firm is a Big 4, a firm with international affiliation, a local firm and the type of industry were studied to analyse the reasons behind audit firm retention and growth.

This research is based on a field study related to audit firms providing services to listed companies in an emerging economy. The sample includes the top 100 publicly held companies’ in the Egyptian stock market during 2006-2011 for which their annual reports are analysed to determine the audit firms’ retention and growth. An assessment of the continuity of the auditors and the increase in the number of audit clients were also measured.

The results confirm that industry specialization has an important effect on the auditor’s retention, especially for industries where capital investment is significant such as buildings, construction, financial services, housing and real estate. Big 4 audit firms retained their clients because of their industry specialization and brand name. Evidence was found that good knowledge of accounting and auditing standards resulted in audit firms with international affiliation competing with the Big 4 for clients’ retention and growth.

This study contributes to the existing literature, as it is among the first to provide empirical evidence on auditor retention, growth and auditor’s dominance in an emerging economy such as Egypt.

International specialisation in production via the development of international trade and factor movements is the basis of much of the developed world′s prosperity. This article is concerned with the forces that drive specialisation in manufacturing in the developed countries, and particularly the role played by regional economic integration in the European Community. A distinction is drawn between specialisation that takes place within (intra) and between (inter) industries with emphasis here on the latter. Specifically, the analysis seeks to explain differences in the sectoral composition of industry between pairs of countries using regression analysis. Factor endowments, per capita incomes and country size are found to influence industrial similarity. Membership of the EC and participation in the EC‐EFTA free trade areas are associated with increased inter‐industry specialisation. Movement towards a European Economic Space could accentuate this phenomenon, with important adjustment implications.

This study aims to investigate growth differentials among small islands and the impact of tourism specialization on the growth and the economic performance of small islands.

The study is based on trade theory and uses data from a panel of small islands for 1995-2007. It applies panel regression and standard time series methods combined with a qualitative approach.

Small islands experienced stronger basic patterns of growth than many developed countries, especially where economies of scale are not an issue. The findings further suggest that tourism specialization is not harmful to growth, and, in lieu of technological gaps and resource limitations, tourism specialization is a sound option. Size, a lack of complete sovereignty or independence and export orientation do not seem to affect the variance in the real per capita GDP at a greater degree. Finally, small islands may leverage returns to scale in global markets.

While tourism specialization is assumed to enhance growth, in the case of small island destinations, the study did not formally test whether increased terms-of-trade may be perpetually improved.

The study prompted four policy suggestions: small island economies should engage in tourism specialization; small island economies should allocate more resources to the tourism industry than other economic sectors; the success of tourism specialization does not depend exclusively on comparative advantage; and institutional realities and path dependence may play a role in economic performance.

The originality of this study lies in the detection of a paradox in mainstream economics that indicates that small islands may not enjoy sustained economic growth. The detection led to a surprising discovery that tourism specialization may propel growth. The value of the study is twofold: theoretical value is added by suggesting a reconceptualization of the construct capital; and, practical value is strengthened in the sense that tourism specialization may only work under a condition where upon tourism offerings command higher prices than other commodities.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the paradox between diversification and specialization from a dynamic perspective. More precisely, this paper will analyze the impact of diversification and specialization as well as their interaction on regional innovation in different development stages.

Based on the principles of new economic geography and innovation geography, data from 30 provinces from 2001 to 2017 was used to explore the relationship. Least squares regressions with fix effect were used to examine the hypotheses.

The results show that both diversification and specialization have a significant and positive impact on regional innovation. The interaction of diversification and specialization also significantly and positively impacts regional innovation. The effect of industrial agglomeration is heterogeneity under different development stages.

This paper verifies the positive role of diversification and specialization and their interaction in promoting regional innovation. The impact of industrial agglomeration on innovation is dynamic and changes with the regional development process. Emerging economies should make appropriate industrial agglomeration strategies according to their development stages.

This paper introduces diversification, specialization and their interaction into the research framework at the same time to analyze their impact on innovation performance which deepened the research of industrial agglomeration. Taking China as an example, this paper also examines the impact of industrial agglomeration on regional innovation in different development stages that expands the dynamic perspective of industrial agglomeration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints to attend salsa events and festivals across salsa dancing specialization segments.

In‐depth interviews with salsa dancers from three salsa specialization levels were carried out.

Specialization level acted as a predictor of salsa event attendance and there appears to be an event career associated to progress in salsa dancing specialisation, which eventually branched out to a tourist career. Moreover, there was a relationship between the types of constraints and recreation specialisation level, with participants negotiating constraints frequently in order to ensure event attendance.

The interviews were carried out on participants in a mid‐size town in southern England, where the range of competing leisure activities is limited. In addition, the study focused on one recreational activity and one type of event.

Several implications for the marketing of events and festivals can be drawn. First, marketers of salsa events should tie closely with providers of salsa classes and marketers of salsa classes need to provide opportunities for salsa dancers to attend events. Second, marketing strategies aiming at helping recreationists overcome constraints should be different according to the level of specialization. Third, given the nature of constraints faced by the less experienced recreationists, efforts to attract individuals earlier in the specialization path may be fruitless.

This paper is one of the first to explicitly examine the relationship between specialization and constraints to perform behaviors associated to a recreational activity.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the approaches to smart specialisation being adopted in different European Union (EU) regions are likely to be heavily shaped by the institutional and governance context, as well as the regional economic specifics. Along with the specific regional economic characteristics, these institutional variations mean that there is no single smart specialisation template or blueprint which can be transplanted onto every region. Rather, regions have to work within their own governance frameworks to find their best solutions.

As evidence of this, the authors analyse the possibilities and challenges faced by four different sets of regional examples in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Using OECD, EU and other official national documents and publications, the authors are able to explain the ways in which the governance set-ups vary enormously across these different arenas although they do share some certain common features with the other examples on a case-by-case basis.

The policy architecture within which the smart specialisation agenda will be operating is very different in each national or regional case. As such, in addition to the regional economic specifics, the smart specialisation challenges faced by different regions are likely to differ significantly due to governance issues as well as variations in the regional economic conditions. This is because the possibilities for different regional actions depend heavily on the governance relationship between the regional and the local governance remits.

The argument presented here are necessarily in part speculative in that while they are based on a regional systems-of-innovation conceptual framework which links institutions, innovation and regional development, the actual smart specialisation implementation processes are still in their infancy, so that the actual outcomes remain to be seen in the long run.

The analysis here helps to situate smart specialisation discussions in the national-regional institutional and governance context. This also serves to frame how smart specialisation priority-setting processes are likely to be undertaken and helps to consider how such activities may play out in other regions with different institutional settings.

This is one of the few papers that explicitly examine specialisation issues in a governance and institutional setting. In reality, the success or otherwise of smart specialisation agenda will be heavily shaped by how the governance and institutional issues are addressed. Good analysis and data gathering is essential, but good governance for policy design, monitoring and evaluation can potentially also provide a crucial advantage to smart specialisation actions. In contrast, poor governance may undermine good smart specialisation intentions and analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between service specialization and operational performance in hospitals. Existing literature has mostly been concerned with the performance effects of operational focus, which can be seen as an extreme form of specialization. It is not clear, however, whether an effect similar to the focus effect can be observed also in cases where specialization takes on less extreme forms. The authors analyze this effect up to and above the effects of volume, learning and patient selection.

Ordinary least squares (OLS) and two‐stage regression models were used to analyze patient data from 142 Austrian hospitals over the 2002‐2006 period. The sample contains 322,193 patient groups (841,687 patient group‐year observations).

The authors find that increased specialization in a service leads to a more efficient provision of this service in terms of shorter length of stay. The analysis shows that this effect holds even after controlling for volume, learning, and patient selection effects. The authors suggest that the pure specialization effect is due to the increased administrative and medical attention that is given to a service when the relative importance of that service increases.

The paper's results indicate hospital managers should pay attention to the impact of specialization when making service‐mix decisions. If two services have the same or a similar level of operational performance, then this does not mean that hospital managers should be indifferent as to the relative volume of these services.

The paper provides additional insights into the impact of service‐level specialization not examined in prior literature.