Increased Audit Competition, Interlocking and Financial Reporting Quality in an Emerging Market

The present study aims to figure out whether audit market competition and large shareholders and auditor’s interlock(Interlocking) is associated with the quality of financial reporting or not.

The auditor’s concentration is used for audit market competition for this study's purpose. The absolute value of accruals is employed for measuring the financial reporting quality. The required information is collected from 112 listed companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2012-2018 and analyzed using the pooled regression model.

The study results show that auditor’s competition is associated positively with accruals and negatively and significantly with financial reporting quality. The findings also indicate that the quality of financial reporting goes up by declining competition in the audit market and increasing the auditors' interlock and large shareholders.

In contrast to the conducted studies on different types of interlock, this paper has focused on the interlock of large shareholders and auditors in an emerging market with increased competition