Does Auditor's Gender Impact Audit Fees? Empirical Evidence from Swedish Privately Held Companies

Sammanfattning: The documented relationship between engaged auditors' gender and audit fees demonstrates that female auditors may receive a fee premium in listed companies' settings. However, the heterogeneity between public and private Companies implies that previous findings in listed companies may not be generalizable to the private setting. Furthermore, additional gender-based behavioral and industrial attributes on audit fees might moderate the relationship between audit fees and auditors' genders, varying from previous findings. Therefore, this paper aims to examine whether the gender of engaged auditors affects the fees paid to external auditors in privately held companies. Using a set of archival data of Swedish private limited liability companies during fiscal year 2006 to 2009 and 2010 to 2015, we evidence that female auditors receive significantly lower audit fees than their male counterparts, which is divergent from the previous literature on listed companies. Besides, we examine and confirm the robustness of our results by conducting several additional tests. Although our study suggests an interesting finding, it should be interpreted with caution without sound theoretical explanations supporting. Potential grounds have been developed in our paper to possibly expound the result.