Anti-Monopoly Law And Auditor Selection Of Monopoly Enterprises

The Anti-monopoly Law is an important basis for maintaining fair market order.Since its implementation in 2008,the anti-monopoly Law,as a competition policy to correct market order,has not only played an important role in improving the efficiency of economic operation,safeguarding the social public interest,promoting the healthy development of the socialist market economy and other macro aspects,but also has a significant impact on the behavior of micro-enterprises.The existing researches on auditor selection focus on the supply side of audit services,while the researches on the determinants of auditor selection for firms on the demand side are insufficient.As for the relevant fields of competition and auditor selection concerned in this paper,opinions are generally positive and negative and both have theoretical support.No consensus has been reached yet.This paper takes auditor selection as the entry point,focuses on the policy effect of the Anti-Monopoly Law on micro enterprises,under the circumstances of the impact of the Antimonopoly Law and the increase of operating pressure,how will the audit demand of monopoly enterprises change? It is possible to select high quality auditors to reduce agency costs,to reinforce high quality reporting signals,or to perform auditor selection downgrades to facilitate upward or downward earnings management,thus dressing or lowering performance as needed to maintain reputation or avoid antitrust investigations.Under the policy impact,enterprises’ response decisions can reflect the influence of competition policy on microeconomy,and also be an answer to the effect of the implementation of the Anti-Monopoly Law.In order to explore the above problems,aiming at the quasi-natural experiment of the implementation of the Anti-Monopoly Law,this paper selected A-share listed companies from2003 to 2020 as the research object,used the PSM-DID model to investigate the impact of the implementation of the anti-monopoly Law on auditor selection,and on this basis further tested its mechanism of action and conducted heterogeneity analysis.The results showed that:(1)After the implementation of the anti-monopoly Law,compared with non-monopoly enterprises,monopoly enterprises have lower audit quality requirements and are more inclined to choose lower-quality auditors.(2)After the implementation of the Anti-Monopoly Law,enterprises that adopt earnings management to deal with the policy impact are more inclined to choose lowquality auditors.(3)After the implementation of the Anti-Monopoly Law,the higher the business risk,the more inclined to choose lower-quality auditors.(4)The effect of the implementation of the Anti-Monopoly Law on auditors of enterprises with high monopoly power choosing to downgrade is mainly reflected in regions with high marketization level,and is more significant in state-owned enterprises and enterprises with high customer concentration.