Suchergebnisse

The paper analyses a recent form of inter-organizational network form – the so-called "network contract"(NC) - introduced by the Italian government and aimed to sustain firms' cooperation and innovation. NC is investigated in order to highlight its main strengths and weaknesses and the major challenges they pose are also discussed. Findings demonstrate that NCs can be considered an interesting formal option for managing inter-organizational networks under some specific conditions in terms of governance and relational dynamics and that they could have significant impact on member firms' performance

AbstractThe European Directive 2014/95, in force in 2017, requires non‐financial information to all public interest entities with more than 500 employees. However, multinational companies as 'global corporate citizen' have already started to communicate sustainability disclosure, before the accounting regulation imperative. The paper studies the sustainability disclosure behaviour of a global multinational Company, Eni, an Italian Integrated Oil & Gas Listed Company. The aim is to examine the relationship between the 'self‐regulation' disclosure before the law and the forces within the company that drove that decision and the ex‐post disclosure after the regulation imperative. The analysis is conducted over the 2018–2011 period and considers all the annual reports (i.e., financial report and social, environmental or sustainability reports). The results state that 'self‐regulation' is guided by strategic legitimacy based on factors as corporate strategy, corporate identity and stakeholders' pressure while the accounting regulation represents a tool to summarize non‐financial data.

Directive 2014/95, in force since 2017, is the first European step that requires companies to provide mandatory non-financial information (NFI). The regulation concerns sustainability information with the policy goal of increased accountability and comparability among European "public interest entities" on that matters. According to the framework of Regulatory Integrated Assessment (RIA), the study compares the disclosure before and after the Directive application considering the content (what) and the location of the information in companies" reports (where). Content analysis is applied to both financial and non-financial reports to create a disclosure scoring index and an overlapping one. Thus to compare the ex-ante analysis to the ex-post by a quantitative scoring system. The research contributes to the debate on the regulatory policy evaluation examining whether the ex-post assessment reveals a change in companies" reporting behaviour about non-financial information, i.e. if the regulation achieves its policy objectives of improving sustainability disclosure. Findings show differences between the ex-ante and the ex-post phase: after the enforcement of the Directive there is an increase in the degree of disclosure (what) and a reduction in the level of overlap (where), with more companies choosing "embedded" reports. These results are a preliminary step in the regulatory policy evaluation and they answer to the request of more studies on the ex-post implementation review of regulation.

In this article, we have used a continuous EBIT-based model to study deferred taxation under default risk. Quite surprisingly, default risk has been disregarded in research on deferred taxation. In order to underline its importance, we first calculated the probability of default, over a given time period, together with the contingent value of tax deferral. We then applied our theoretical model to a sample of 27,749 OECD companies. We showed that, when accounting for both firms with a negative EBIT and firms with a probability of default higher than 50% (over a 10-year period), a relevant percentage of firms were close enough to default. Hence, these taxpayers should not consider deferred taxation in their financial statements, for the sake of prudence. Moreover, under default, the expected present value of deferred taxes was much lower than that obtained in a deterministic context. Hence, if we look at deferred taxes from the Government's point of view, we must consider them as being risk-free loans. However, only a portion are subsequently repaid, due to default. This implies that, when a Government allows accelerated tax depreciation it should be aware of future losses due to default. So far, these estimates have been missing, although techniques do exist and are quite practical.