Audit pricing, legal liability regimes, and big 4 premiums: Theory and cross-country evidence

In this paper, we first develop a model in which national legal environments play a crucial role in determining auditor effort and audit fees. Our model predicts that (a) audit fees increase monotonically with the strength or strictness of a country's legal liability regime; (b) given a legal liability regime, Big 4 auditors charge higher audit fees than non-Big 4 auditors; and (c) the Big 4 fee premium is lower in countries with strong legal regimes than in countries with weaker legal regimes. We then test the model's predictions using a large sample of audit clients from 15 countries with different legal regimes where audit fee data are publicly available. The results of our cross-country regressions are…