상장법인에 대한 감사시장에서 Big 4 프리미엄에 대한 연구

This paper investigate whether the Big 4 enjoys premium in Korea when deciding audit fee for listed companies in KOSPI except for financial companies including banks and insurances. Using generally known audit fee model, first this study review whether the Big 4 has been enjoyed the premium during the period of 2005 to 2012. Further, after adding additional controlling variable, audit time, in the audit fee model, I performed the multi-variate regression again to see the source of premium. To have better understanding of the premium, the samples were divided two categories, one, companies larger than 1 trillion KRW and the other, companies smaller than 1 trillion KRW. And then I performed the same regression. The study showed that Big 4 does enjoy premium in the market. However, after adding the controlling variable, audit time, no Big 4 premium was found. More specifically, companies whose total asset is more than 1 trillion Won showed negative relationship between Big 4 and audit fee, meaning audit fee discount by Big 4. In case of the other smaller companies, premium was observed even though statistically not significant. Big 4 could not claim premium for the bigger companies where they seems to charge premium audit fee for smaller companies. Concern on audit quality over bigger companies as audit fee is good proxy of audit quality. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted that i) Big 4 could not demand estimated audit time when negotiating the audit fee in advance due to severe competition especially in case of bigger companies audit engagement ii) Big 4 may leverage audit experiences on bigger companies to demands audit fee premium from smaller companies, another example of economics of sales enjoyed by bigger companies.