The associations of corporate social responsibilityand management charateristics with performance in Saudi Arabia

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships of corporate social responsibility, management characteristics, namely; board size and meetings, and audit characteristics, namely; audit quality and audit report lag with corporate performance among the manufactured companies in Saudi Arabia. A Pooled Ordinary-Least Square OLS regression is utilized to estimate the associations proposed in the hypotheses on 180 firm-years observations (2015-2017) from annual reports. The study finds that corporate social responsibility, board size, board meetings and audit quality are positively associated with corporate performance. Additionally, this study reports an inverse association of the audit report lag with corporate performance. Importantly, the study suggests that regulators, especially Saudi stock exchange, should mandate companies to disclose all relevant information related to corporate social responsibility in a transparent and timely manner, and increase law enforcement to enhance good corporate governance practices. For companies, this study proposes that they should emphasize more on enhancing the role and the disclosure quality of their social responsibility, board of directors and the audit quality issues, as this enhancement may positively influence their performance.