مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد فصلی بودن حسابرسی و قیمت گذاری خدمات ممیزی: متاآنالیز (الزویر)

Auditing is seasonal. This is because audit clients’ choice of fiscal year-end is not uniformly distributed throughout the calendar year. In the U.S., the majority of public companies have a December fiscal year-end. This clustering of fiscal year-ends introduces audit seasonality to the auditing profession, resulting in an audit “busy season” and “off-season”. This may affect the cost structure of audit firms, which in turn affects audit pricing, which is the subject of our study. We use an economic framework that suggests that the differential pricing of audit services between the busy season and the off-season may be the result of two effects. First, the difference in demand for busy season and off-season audits gives rise to opportunities for audit service providers to engage in third-degree price discrimination, i.e. the ability to charge different prices to different groups of clients for similar services. Second, the capacity constraint experienced by audit firms during the busy season results in a relatively inelastic supply, raising the marginal cost of production and thus justifying higher audit fees. We conduct a meta-analysis of 97 analyses from 18 audit fee studies of U.S. public companies from 2005 to 2015, and find evidence in support of the framework that the audit busy season is associated with an audit fee premium of approximately 10 percent.