The Effects of Board Characteristics on Financial Reporting Timeliness: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam

The paper aims to examine the relationship between the Board of Directors’ characteristics and the timeliness of financial statements of listed firms in Vietnam. Accordingly, research data was collected from the FiinPro Platform database system, which included financial statements of 548 organizations listed on the Hochiminh Stock Exchange and the Hanoi Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2018. The paper employs the OLS regression method with a strong standard error method and FGLS to handle the problem of variable variance and autocorrelation. The research results show that the following three factors have significant impacts on the timeliness of financial statements: the duality of Chairman, the age of Chairman, and the change of members of the Board of Directors. The findings suggest that the duality of the Chairman of the Board of Directors will lead to a decrease in control effectiveness, adversely affecting the timeliness of the financial statements. In addition, the change of members in the Board of Directors will lead to a positive change in the timely provision of information. The age of the Chairman of the Board of Directors also positively impacts the timeliness of financial statements.