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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the content of relational capital disclosure (RCD) information communicated by a sample of European listed companies. It also investigates the links between RCD and certain corporate financial performance indicators. Design/methodology/approach – This research did a cross-country analysis on a sample of 80 companies and a content analysis based on 51 items inherent to the relational capital (RC) framework of mandatory and voluntary reports. An RCD index has been used in certain bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses to investigate whether RCD is positively correlated to particular indicators adopted as proxies for measuring company performance. Findings – The results show that RCD supports statistically significant relationships with revenues, net operating cash flow and capital expenditures. In contrast, there is no statistically significant association with enterprise value. Research limitations/implications – This study evaluates the information disclosed in annual reports or other standalone reports, although companies might communicate such information using other information channels. The main caveat of this study is sample size; therefore, it could be insightful to extend this cross-country study. Practical implications – The research could encourage preparers to improve the disclosure of specific items of RC and could offer useful suggestions to policymakers, for instance, to the European Commission, as it has recently announced new requirements for non-financial information reporting (Directive 2014/95/UE). Originality/value – Given the crucial role of RC in company success and RCD’s importance for the decision-making process, this study provides interesting insights into the debate on RC reporting’s impacts on company performance.

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the board diversity and the investments in innovation in a sample of companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange (named Borsa Italiana) and operating in the consumer goods and in the consumer services industry. This sample covers the period from 2006 to 2010 and contains 345 observations. Drawing on the literature review, we pinpointed six hypotheses related to the impact on the investments in innovation of the following independent variables: 1. presence of outside directors; 2. average number of the other positions held by the members of the board; 3. minority shareholder representatives on the board; 4. presence of women on the board of directors; 5. number of committees; 6. frequency of board meetings. Furthermore, on the basis of the previous empirical studies, to measure the investments in innovation (the dependent variable), we chose these accounting ratios: total intangible assets divided by total assets and total R&D costs divided by total sales. From the methodology standpoint, we used both the bivariate statistic (i.e. Pearson Correlations and Anova one way) and the multivariate one (i.e. OLS regression analysis with robust standard errors calculated by the Newey-West, HAC method). Our findings confirm the previous studies and show that, also for the Italian listed companies operating in the industries mentioned earlier, the outsiders as well as the frequency of meetings held by the Strategy Committee assume a relevant role in supporting the investments in innovation. Conversely, the other independent variables concerning board diversity (i.e. women, minority shareholder representatives etc.) are not statistically significant and, as a result, do not influence the investments in innovation.

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Studies in U.S. have found that that director capital influences turnover within the board after an incident of fraud. We analyse whether there is a relationship between the probability of non-executive director turnover in Italian listed firms in which fraud has occurred and each director’s level of: (1) general business knowledge, (2) industry knowledge, and (3) relational capital. Our results suggest that non-executive director departure can be explained as a result of decisions by companies to clean their house of directors with lower expertise, industry knowledge and relational capital. These findings indicate that firms encourage the departure of these non-executive directors to signal to their stakeholders that they want to repair legitimacy and want to enhance the monitoring and resource provider tasks of the board. Indeed, in Italy, director turnover is more marked when the fraud visibility is greater. Furthermore, our study findings indicate that the cleaning house strategy is not influenced by the ownership structure and identity

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