---
title: "Audit market concentration and the price of an audit"
description: "The Big 4 auditors appear on 32 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of 38 papers on the audit market carry a concentration, competition or fee keyword. Audit fees have risen sharply, and regulators worry about four firms auditing almost every large company. Does concentration raise fees, lower quality or both?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/audit-market-concentration
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/audit-market-concentration.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Audit market concentration and the price of an audit: The Big 4 auditors appear on 32 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of 38 papers on the audit market carry a concentration, competition or fee keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["accounting", "audit", "competition"]
keywords: ["Big 4 auditors", "audit market competition"]
---

# Audit market concentration and the price of an audit

The Big 4 auditors appear on 32 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of 38 papers on the audit market carry a concentration, competition or fee keyword. Audit fees have risen sharply, and regulators worry about four firms auditing almost every large company. Does concentration raise fees, lower quality or both?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 38 papers carry a Big 4 or audit-market keyword (18 in finance journals, 13 in accounting); "Big 4 auditors" appears on 32. Only 9 of the 38 also carry a concentration, competition, fee, choice or market-share keyword, and "audit market concentration" on a single paper.

## Questions

- In local audit markets where one Big 4 office dominates, are fees higher and are restatements more or less common?
- When a Big 4 firm exits a market segment or a country, what happens to the fees and the quality of the clients it leaves?
- Do joint audits or shared audits, as tried in France and proposed in the UK, change concentration or only cost?

## Data that could help

Audit fees and auditor identities (Audit Analytics), office-level market shares, restatements and inspection findings.

## Next step

Compute office-level audit market concentration for US metropolitan areas and relate it to fee growth and restatement rates for 2015–2025.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| Big 4 auditors | 2 | #1303 | 3, 1, 2, 4, 5, 1, 3, 1, 0, 2, 3, 2, 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 5, 3, 3, 7, 1, 5, 4, 3, 4, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1, 2 | 103 |
| audit market competition | 0 | – | 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0 | 5 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Audit market concentration and the price of an audit. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/audit-market-concentration

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-audit-market-concentration,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Audit market concentration and the price of an audit},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/audit-market-concentration}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).