RISULTATI RICERCA

This study examines the association between socially responsible investor (SRI) ownership and the ESG performance of 30 Italian listed companies over 2018–2022. Drawing on Institutional Theory, we consider both the composite ESG score and its Environmental, Social, and Governance pillars. SRIs are defined as institutional investors that are signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UN PRI). A distinctive feature of the study is the comparison between domestic and foreign SRI ownership. Using panel regressions with firm and year fixed effects and ESG data from Refinitiv, the results show that total SRI ownership is positively associated with the composite ESG score. The disaggregated analysis indicates that foreign SRI ownership is positively associated with the composite ESG score, whereas domestic SRI ownership is positively associated only with the Governance score. The presence of a sustainability committee is also positively associated with the composite ESG score and the Social pillar. The findings suggest that a shared formal commitment to responsible investment may be associated with different ESG outcomes depending on investors’ geographic origin, thereby extending the application of Institutional Theory to responsible investment. They also offer insights for policymakers, corporate boards, and asset managers seeking to strengthen responsible investment and corporate sustainability practices in Italy.

This study theoretically proposes an analytical framework to study the determinants of Carbon Disclosure (CD) quality, aiming at bridging the perspectives of different theoretical approaches trying to deductively explain causes of firms’ disclosure efforts and the quality of disclosure itself. The paper constructs a theoretical model to compare the reporting strategies of B-Corps (BCs) versus traditional companies (non-BCs). By integrating Legitimacy, Image, and Signaling Theories, the study hypothesizes that while non-BCs could tend towards disclosure driven by symbolic compliance or impression management (implying greenwashing risks), BCs might leverage CD as a substantive signal of their dual purpose. The paper’s original contribution lies in identifying a theoretically informed conceptual framework to study the enabling factors of CD in different organizations, which leverage different legitimacy stakeholders’ expectations and respond with different effort and costly signals to them.

This study explores how manufacturing firms perceive the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use and functions of budgeting systems and on the role of management controllers. Drawing on an exploratory cross-sectional survey with a retrospective orientation, we contacted 500 manufacturing firms located in the province of Bergamo, Italy, collecting 44 usable responses. The findings suggest that budgeting practices were used more intensively during and after the crisis, with more frequent revisions, greater reliance on variance analyses, and the use of forecasting and scenario analysis. In some firms, the pandemic appears to have encouraged the introduction or redesign of budgeting processes, strengthening the control culture and fostering greater flexibility and timeliness in management systems. At the same time, the controller’s role appears to have moved toward a more strategic and collaborative profile, with greater involvement in decision-making processes and cross-functional coordination. Overall, the results suggest that some crisis-induced changes in budgeting and control may persist beyond the emergency phase. Similarly, the controller’s role was increasingly directed at analytical and decision-support activities. Although the study is limited by its geographically concentrated sample, limited number of responses and retrospective self-reported data, it offers exploratory evidence on the possible persistence of crisis-driven practices in budgeting and control.

This article examines the transition from a consent-based conception of politics to a ragion di Stato framework centred on the preservation of monarchical power in early modern Spanish economic thought. Focusing on the trajectory from Juan de Mariana to Martín González de Cellorigo and Sancho de Moncada, it argues that this shift entailed not merely a change in fiscal or economic doctrines, but a deeper trans-formation in the language and purpose of politics itself. While Mariana articulated a political order grounded in consent, property, and justice, later arbitrist writers in-creasingly subordinated these principles to the imperative of conserving and strengthening the monarchy. Drawing on the contrast between political reasoning oriented toward the common good and a governmental rationality concerned with stability, power, and survival, the article shows how economic arguments ‒ on tax-ation, money, and population ‒ were reconfigured as technical instruments of rule rather than objects of political deliberation. In doing so, it situates early seventeenth-century Spanish economic thought within a broader European shift from politics to government, highlighting the role of ragion di Stato in dissolving the boundaries between economic reasoning and the preservation of monarchical authority.

This paper explores how visual aesthetics and artistic practices shape narratives of climate change and migration. As climate impacts intensify, human mobility linked to environmental change has become increasingly prominent in public and political debates, often framed through narratives of threat that obscure structural inequalities and vulnerabilities. Such representations can fuel anxiety and legitimize exclusionary and securitarian responses, particularly in the Global North. Combining a narrative literature review with a desk analysis of artistic initiatives, the paper examines how artistic practices both reproduce and challenge dominant imaginaries, opening alternative and more politically aware understandings of climate (im)mobilities.