Audit Quality and Accounting Conservatism: Evidence from the Listed Companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange

Information theory is one of the hypotheses which explain auditing services demands in free markets. Thus, investors and entrepreneurs are going to have access to audited and verified information to achieve securities trading advantages. Manager opportunistic behaviors could be confined by conservatism and management biases are reduced by asymmetric verification. Conservatism looks like an efficient financial reporting mechanism. So, as mentioned before the goal of this research is to investigate the audit quality influence on accounting conservatism of listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). To have access to this goal, audit quality indices are measured by audit firm size, audit firm tenure and audit firm expertise. Furthermore, firm-level measure of accounting conservatism developed by Khan and Watts (2007) is utilized to measure accounting conservatism. The data sample consists of 84 companies in TSE during 1385 to 1390. In conducting this research, three main hypotheses are designed to examine the audit quality influence on accounting conservatism of the firms. Accordingly, the statistical technique known as the “Pool Data” is exerted to test the research hypotheses.
Hypotheses testing results demonstrate that accounting conservatism is positively affected by audit firm size and audit firm expertise; on the other hand even after controlling potential confounding effects, the relationship between audit firm tenure and accounting conservatism is negative.