When Big 4 Dominance is Broken: The Effect of Audit Industry Structure Change on Auditor Economic Behavior – Evidence from China

Abstract

In 2013, audit firm mergers created two “Chinese” audit firms – Ruihua and BDO Lixin – that outranked EY and KPMG to become two of the four largest audit firms in China in terms of total audit revenue. In this thesis, I examine the impact of this change in audit industry structure on the economic behavior, i.e. audit pricing and audit quality, of these two large local audit firms – or Big L – relative to the Big 4 and the other local audit firms. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that the pre-post change in audit fees for the Big L auditors is significantly higher than that for the Big 4 and the other local audit firms around the mergers. In addition, I find that the Big L firms had a significant improvement in audit quality after the mergers, relative to the Big 4 firms over the same period. That is, holding everything else constant, the Big L had higher propensity to issue modified audit opinions and their clients exhibited improved earnings quality in the post-merger period. In contrast, I find evidence of a decline in audit fees and deterioration of earnings quality for clients of the Big 4 auditors around the mergers. I interpret the results as consistent with a shift in the relative market power among the large audit suppliers in China and the development of brand name reputations by the Big L firms, which provided the ability and incentive for the Big L firms to conduct higher quality audits in the post-merger period. On the other hand, the Big 4 audit firms lost some market power and auditor independence as new large competitors emerged in the industry. This thesis answers calls by Francis (2011) and DeFond and Zhang (2014) for further research on the effects of changes in market structure in the audit industry. Implications for various regulators, including the Ministry of Finance of PRC, the European Commission, and the U.S. SEC, are discussed.