An Empirical Analysis of Audit Delay
实证研究审计延迟（从公司财年末到审计报告日的时间）的决定因素，发现延迟影响信息及时性，进而关联市场反应，对理解会计信息发布的市场影响有用。
This paper reports an empirical study of some determinants of delay, i.e., the length of time from a company's fiscal year-end to the date of the auditor's report. Audit delay can affect the timeliness of accounting information releases, and it is well known that timeliness is associated with the market's reaction to the information released. Therefore, research on the determinants of audit delay may improve our understanding of market reactions to accounting releases. To elaborate, the timeliness of information release can affect the level of uncertainty associated with decisions based on the reported information. For example, it has been shown analytically that timeliness can affect a decision maker's action choices and expected payoff (Feltham [1972, chap. 7]). Moreover, recent empirical studies suggest that timeliness is associated with information used by the market to establish security prices. For example, it has been found that late announcements of earnings are associated with lower (often negative) abnormal returns than are early announcements (Chambers and Penman [1984], Givoly and Palmon [1982], and Kross and Schroeder [1984]).