An International Meeting of the American Accounting Association American Accounting Association 2006 Annual Meeting August 6–9, 2006 Washington, D.C.

Robyn Moroney
Monash University

Carlin Dowling
University of Melbourne

Abstract: Until now little attention has been given to knowledge differences between industry specialist auditors. While it has been noted that industry specialists gain sub-speciality knowledge, there has been no attempt to distinguish between different groups of specialists. Industry specialists in regulated industries acquire detailed uniform knowledge, which is industry-specific. This contrasts with industry specialists in unregulated industries, who acquire mainly general domain knowledge. An experiment is conducted comparing the performance of industry specialists (both regulated and unregulated) and non-specialists with relevant industry-based experience. Due to their superior sub-speciality knowledge, only regulated industry specialists are expected to perform significantly better on an industry-based task than non-specialists. Our results support this expectation.

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