LIBRI DI FRANCESCO GIUNTA

The first case in the world of a mandatory requirement to disclose business model (BM) in the annual report is represented by Companies Act 2013 issued in the UK. The BM offers a simplified representation of a company’s key resources and of how these are combined to create value. For this reason, a systematic communication of BM should affect the way a company’s book value and its capability to generate earnings are perceived. The purpose of this work is to investigate the impact of mandatory BM disclosure on the value relevance of traditional financial measures. Focusing on a sample of UK listed companies over a six-year period, Ohlson model is utilized to assess the value relevance of book value and net income and their interactions with a dummy variable that accounts for the introduction of mandatory disclosure of BM. In line with previous studies on non-financial disclosure regulations, results show that the introduction of the mandatory requirement to disclose BM has a negative moderating effect on book value of equity and a positive moderating effect on net income. As this is the first study to investigate the effects of a mandatory BM disclosure regime, it could be of interest for both academics and standard-setters.

Companies exhibit growing interest in sustainability rhetoric. Such an interest is alternatively justified by a company’s need to address legitimacy instances, rather than to satisfy stakeholders’ requests about its sustainability performance. Whatever the case, a main debated issue concerning sustainability rhetoric deals with the difficulties in understanding whether companies’ commitment towards sustainability is "real", or it only consists of "empty words" that hide opportunistic strategies. Our paper contributes to this debate, proposing a methodological approach, which is based on a company’s business model (BM) representation. We argue that the inclusion of adequate sustainability information in a company’s BM representation can testify to a real company’s engagement, as it illustrates how sustainability affects its value creation process. Compared to extant methodological proposals, mainly based on linguistic analyses, our approach does not require specific competences to be applied. Moreover, it saves user’s time, as it allows the assessment of entire company’s sustainability rhetoric through the analysis of the information reported in its BM. Our approach is consistent with previous contributions that propose a company’s BM as a representation device able to illustrate strategic information that cannot be represented in the traditional corporate reporting. Our approach proposes a possible answer to address the challenges faced by regulators and standard setters involved in the regulation of sustainability disclosure. Such approach has found a first step of implementation in the UK, where since 2013, listed companies are requested to describe their BM in Strategic Reports.

The signalling theory posits that the most profitable companies provide the market with more and better information in order to be fairly evaluated. Empirical evidence that relates companies’ profitability to their disclosure habits, however, reveals disaccording results. To better circumscribe the signalling mechanism, our paper centres on a focal point of the signals that companies send to the financial market: profitability indicators. We have scrutinized the 2008 Management Commentaries of a sample of Italian and UK companies. After controlling for size, risk, industry, and country, our analysis supports the presence of signalling mechanisms. These results corroborate the literature which considers the market capable of autonomously controlling the production and use of information. The main practical implication of our results relates to the communication policies of the information included in the internal control system and, as a consequence, also to the regulation of narrative information in annual reporting.

Intangible assets and related performance measures assume increasing importance in valuation processes. Value relevance studies testify to their importance through an analysis of market stock prices. We aim to examine the value relevance of non-financial indicators in European fashion companies. The indicator selected is the "change in mono-brand stores". Applying the models proposed by current literature, we have refuted the value relevance hypothesis. However, refining both the "operationalization" of the concepts and the related result analysis procedure, the value relevance is confirmed. In this way, we contribute to increasing the generalizability of this research trend and to fuel the debate concerning the standardization process of this information. In particular, following in the footsteps of the Gartner/EBRC project, supported by AICPA (Gartner-EBRC, 2010), our results can help the national and international standard setters to pinpoint the indicators that really matter for the fashion industry and standardize their communication.

Il volume affronta le problematiche relative al governo dei territori costieri, a partire dalle sollecitazioni emerse durante il VII Congresso Regionale dell’INU Sicilia, “Territori costieri: quali politiche per un governo integrato”. Gli ambiti costieri di riferimento, fortemente urbanizzati e spesso oggetto di uno sviluppo non regolamentato, sono espressione di una complessità che generalmente viene affrontata con pratiche e strumenti pianificatori di settore che ne mettono a repentaglio il fragile equilibrio.