6. ConclusionThe empirical evidence

6. Conclusion
The empirical evidence shown in this study offers further insights into the determinants
of audit report timeliness. Two crucial CEO characteristics are included, namely, tenure
and financial expertise, among the factors possibly affecting audit report timeliness. This is because it is believed that a CEO has a significant influence on the quality of financial reporting and that these characteristics have an influence on the behaviour of the CEOs. It is reported that a long-tenured CEOs or those with financial expertise are positively associated with audit report timeliness. Results further show that CEO characteristics complement each other in explaining the timeliness of the audit report.
Particularly, empirical evidence is found, suggesting that the long-tenured CEO who has
accounting expertise could be more active in enhancing the strategic decisions and the quality of financial reporting. Findings are also supplemented by conducting various robustness tests and the findings are reported as robust for the measurement of variables, the small sample and the problem of endogeneity. Overall, findings indicate that CEO characteristics do matter in respect of the timeliness of the audit report. This study contributes to the literature on audit report timeliness by documenting that the characteristics of a CEO do matter in respect of the timeliness of the audit report. Moreover, evidence is presented concerning the relative importance of the interaction among the CEO characteristics in relation to financial reporting timeliness. Prior literature on the effect of the characteristics of executives on financial reporting quality has not considered this issue. In addition, the literature is extended concerning emerging markets by providing evidence on the characteristics of the CEO beyond duality and shareholding. Finally, findings contain significant implications for the regulators,
boards of directors and shareholders. Similar to prior research, this study is not isolated from limitations that suggest caution in the interpretation of the results. First, it is recognised that the setting, Oman, prevents the investigation from being enriched due to the lack of public disclosure and insufficient cooperation between the companies and the academic society. For example, the additional characteristics of the CEOs, such as age, shareholding and compensation,
were not considered. Further, this lack of information prevents the adoption of a more
sophisticated approach of analysing the effect of the CEO on company policies (Bertrand
and Schoar, 2003). Second, empirical results are based on a small sample size from Oman
and particularly on the data of non-financial companies, thereby limiting the generalisability of the results to similar institutional settings and jurisdictions, and lowering the statistical power of the various tests, although bootstrap resampling method has been used to overcome this problem. Thus, such limitations warrant future research to re-explore this issue and to test the overall generalisability of the findings to other jurisdictions.