THE CANADIAN AUDIT MARKET IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the structure of the Canadian audit market between 1901 and 1941 based on a sample of 3661 financial statements from 956 firms. Two aspects of the market are examined: first, the overall degree of market concentration, and second, the existence of market segmentation. In addition, a specific concern of the paper is to analyse competition between domestic accounting firms and the international accounting firms leading to the merger of major independent Canadian firms with international accounting firm networks after World War Two. The data show a pattern of increasing concentration during the period among a small set of domestic and international firms. The data identify both a national market and a series of regional markets for audit services. There is also evidence of market segmentation by industry and stock exchange listing. Overall, the evidence suggests that the early Canadian audit market was competitive but fragmented into a series of niche markets. Domestic firms were able to compete with the international firms but the market was becoming increasingly concentrated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".