We provide evidence that distinguishes between competing production cost-based explanations of how to interpret unusually high (or low) audit fees and their expected relation with accounting quality. Abnormally high or low fees are typically proxied by the residuals obtained from fee models....

Do abnormally high or low audit fees reflect audit quality? In this paper, we re-examine this issue after controlling for the confounding effect of audit hours by using a sample of public firms in the Korean audit market, which publicly discloses both audit fees and audit hour information. While...