| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 會計學系 === 107 === High-quality financial statements can provide information that is useful for decision-making to investors, and therefore receive public attention. The comparability of financial statements is an important quality feature that can enhance the usefulness of accounting information. Based on the research of Francis et al. (2014), this study aims to explore whether auditor industry specialization, audit firm size and the amount of investing in audit technology are the factors that make Big 4 audit firms have different “audit style”, and therefore make financial statement comparability between their clients different. In this study, I use the listed companies that are audited by Big 4 audit firms from 2014 to 2016 in Taiwan as the observations. This study matches two companies in the same year, same industry, and audited by the same Big 4 audit firm as a pair, using the absolute value of the difference in discretionary accruals to measure financial statement comparability. The empirical results show that when the audit firm is an industry expert or the firm invests more in audit technology, the financial statement comparability between its clients is higher; as for audit firm size, the larger the Big 4 audit firm is, the lower the financial statement comparability between its clients is. The empirical results are robust and also consistent with the expectations of this study.
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