The Impact of the External Audit Quality on the Financial Performance of Conventional and Islamic Banks

Abstract The continuing emergence of sudden financial crises and the bankruptcy of Big banks audited by the ‘Big Four’ auditors confirms that the external audit quality (EAQ) always remains insufficient compared to the desired quality. The quality weakness is due either to the bad audit company choice, although their sizes, or to the disrespect of the good audit rules. Because there is a lack of comparative studies in the framework of conventional and Islamic banks, this paper aims to compare the impact of EAQ on the financial performance (FP) of 180 conventional banks and 180 Islamic banks. FP and EAQ variables are collected from 56 countries over the period (2010–2020). To overcome the mystery of the best EAQ selection based on its impact on FP, this paper relied on the GLS estimator. Consequently, this paper concluded that the EAQ affected the conventional banks’ FP, but it improved that of Islamic banks with a moderate impact.