RT journal article
T1 MARKET POWER AND AUDIT MARKET COLLUSION: THE SPANISH CASE
T2 Poder de mercado y colusión en el mercado de auditoría: El caso Español
A1 Rodríguez Castro, Paula Isabel
A1 Ruiz Barbadillo, Emiliano
A1 Biedma López, Estíbaliz
A2 Economía Financiera y Contabilidad
K1 Audit
K1 Collusion
K1 Market Power
K1 Concentration
K1 Mobility
AB Purpose: The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the major international audit firms reach collusive agreements in Spain, in order to exercise market power and impose higher prices than those of competitors. According to traditional theory of oligopoly, the ability to achieve these agreements is dependent primarily on the high level of market concentration, so that multiple studies have analyzed the relationship between concentration and prices. However, the concentration has serious limitations to infer collusion and therefore the exercise of market power (Dedman and Lennox, 2009).Design/Methodology/Approach: Therefore, based on an alternative current of the theory of industrial organization, we use measures of industrial mobility as a measure of collusion or rivalry of firms in oligopolistic markets.Results: Our results reveal that international audit firms do not reach collusive agreements to limit competition between them.Social implications: According to the empirical evidence that we get, the measures taken by the regulatory bodies, in order to decentralize the market, would not be necessary nor efficient and they would have significant costs for the audit market (GAO, 2003, 2008, FRC, 2009; European Commission, 2010, Competition Commission, 2013).Originality/Value: In our knowledge, this is the first study to introduce mobility measures to explain market collusion and the exercise of market power in the audit market.
PB Emerald Publishing Limited
SN 2056-5127, 1012-8255
YR 2017
FD 2017-08-07
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34620
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34620
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 10-nov-2026