هیراد نظری

Information is the most important source of decision-making, and its important role in the capital market makes it the most important asset. The auditing profession provides useful data for potential investors to have informed decisions by providing information for companies in the form of financial statements. However, the speed of reaction and the right decision by investors depend on the qualitative characteristics of financial statements; and the most important one is timely access to information. According to the theoretical foundation of financial reporting, timely access to information is one of the limitations of financial reporting that overshadows the achievements of qualitative reporting characteristics. Timely annual financial reporting, as an information advantage, remains at the center of investors' attention. On the other hand, the various characteristics of the audit committee chair can overshadow the effectiveness of information disclosure outside and play an effective role in timely financial reporting. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of financial expertise and empirical features of audit committee chairman on timely financial reporting.

Method:

 The statistical population of the study was all the companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during a 6-year period from 2013 to 2018. To test the research hypotheses, we used the OLS model with robust standard errors. Also, to control the confounding effects of industries and different years, we added dummy variables to the regression models. We could examine the confounding influences of industries and years, and the model fits correctly.

Results:

The results show that there is no significant relationship between financial expertise and empirical features of the audit committee chairman with a delay in the audit report. Also, the additional results obtained from the robustness test strongly support the results of the principal research model. Therefore, there is not enough evidence to support the research hypotheses.

Conclusion:

The results of the data analysis indicate that the financial expertise and the tenure of the Audit Committee chairman do not help to improve the timeliness of financial reporting. The results also show that the measures of corporate governance concerning the audit committee do not display the expected performance in the companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. The emergence of audit committees as well as the internal audit profession, which complements audit committees, can be a reason for this issue. Lack of knowledge and the necessary basic training, lack of clear instructions, the incomplete formation of audit committees and internal audit unit, and lack of full support of the company's senior management of the internal audit unit can be the reasons for the lack of impact. Over time, we expect more experiences and future reforms of audit committees to become more efficient and effective and to play a prominent role in improving corporate governance indicators.

The timely provision of financial information in annual reporting as an information advantage has always been the focal point of investors. This feature, under the influence of managerial capability, can directly affect the effectiveness of disclosure of external information. In this regard, the present study aims to investigate the effect of management's ability to timely financial reporting.

For this purpose, the data of 127 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange were used during the 10-year period of 2008-2018 Measuring the ability of managers with the model of Demerjian et al. (2013) and data coverage analysis (DEA) was performed.

The results of the hypothesis test showed that powerful managers have an inactive effect on the delay of the announcement of profit and the audit report, resulting in the disclosure of more timely financial information.

Overall, the results show that increasing managers' ability to have a positive impact on the timeliness of financial reporting, and timely publication of financial information results in a reduction of information asymmetry between the company and investors.

Cash is considered as the most important internal source of any firm under its management’ control. The marginal value of cash is influenced by management ability. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between managerial ability and its impact on the marginal value of cash. In this regard, information of 176 firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the period of 2012-2018 was studied. Managerial ability is measured according to the model of Demirjian et al. (2012). Also, Abnormal share returns and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is used to measure marginal value of cash. The main econometric methods of the research are multiple regression (with robust standard error, plus industry and year fixed effects) as well as a clustering method. The main results of the study show that the managerial ability has a significant positive association with marginal value of cash. In other words, marginal value of cash is higher for firms that hire capable managers, because they make better use of available financial resources, including cash, and greater returns for the firms.

The business entities face with the different financing strategies in their capital structure to achieve an optimal form. In today’s world, business entities are currently facing different financing strategies in their capital structure in order to achieve an optimal form. One of the main problems is the financing effect on the characteristics of the capital market such as the stock liquidity. Therefore, this research is aimed at investigating the relationship between the capital structure and the stock liquidity with an emphasis on the trade-off theory and the pecking order theory.

The data of 146 companies, which are members of the Tehran Stock Exchange, during the period of 2011-2016 have been used in order to test the hypotheses. And the multivariable regression analysis has been used to test the assumptions and the hypotheses.

The results of the first hypothesis test show that the Bid-Ask prices increase as the liquidity measure and this in turn results in a decrease in the stock liquidity by increasing the financing via financial leverage. Meanwhile, the significant relationship between the debt financing and other stock liquidity measures was not observed in the first hypothesis test. The results of other tests were also approved, the negative relationship between internal and external financing and the liquidity measures. So, the tests provide evidence of the severity of the reverse effect of internal financing than the external financing on the stock liquidity which is inconsistent with the pecking order theory.

The results of the research indicate that different financing decisions in the Tehran Stock Exchange companies do not have significant effects on stock liquidity and, hence, the cost of corporate capital.