Auditing IFRS : A Quantitative Study on How IFRS Has Affected Audit Fees in Sweden

Sammanfattning: In this paper we studied the effect of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on audit fees in Sweden. Using a classic audit fee model, with data between 2001-2019 for 100 publicly traded Swedish firms we studied the effects of IFRS on audit fees during the implementation period as well as the long-term effects of IFRS adoption. In addition to this we investigated if the adoption of IFRS affected large and small firms differently. In contrast to most previous literature, we found that the implementation of IFRS has not had any short- or long-term effects on audit fees in Sweden. However, we found small indications that changes in audit fees are lower for large firms after the implementation of IFRS but the model’s explanatory factor was low and the effect small so no definitive conclusions could be made. The results remain the same after performing several robustness tests.