Audit and reporting delays: Evidence from an emerging market

This article reports the results of an empirical investigation of the timeliness of annual reports of an unbalanced panel of 231 firms-years of financial and nonfinancial companies listed on the Bahrain Stock Exchange. It is found that the determinants of timeliness of annual reporting are company size, profitability, and leverage. No evidence was found to support the effect of accounting complexity or auditor type (Big Four or non-Big Four). Furthermore, the corporate governance proxies were found to be the determinants of the period between the auditors' signature dates and the publication dates.