Directive 2014/95/EU was released with the aim of improving the transparency, comparability and harmonization of non-financial reporting among European undertakings. However, the Directive is vague regarding both non-financial disclosure contents and the transposition of its provisions into national European laws, making it somewhat ambiguous. This issue has been underlined by scholars, who have found the comparison of non-financial disclosures challenging and have not seen a considerable improvement in the level of transparency. This is also mirrored in the assurance process, which remains underexplored. The present exploratory study analyses non-financial disclosure assurance in the Italian financial services sector. Content analysis of the level and features of assurance of non-financial disclosures published in 2020 was conducted. The results show that the ambiguity of the Directive also has consequences for assurance outcomes, which remain limited and strictly adhere to provisions provided by national practitioner associations.
In this paper, we investigate the relation between the different accounting treatments of R&D expenditures and the risk of the entity in order to identify under which treatment insiders are more likely to carry out earnings management. By analysing the R&D investment strategies of a sample of 137 listed Italian entities that complied with the requirements of IAS 38 during fiscal year 2009, following Lantz and Sahut (2005), we calculate several indexes that show the preferences of insiders to account R&D expenditures as costs or capital assets, and we study the relation of such preferences with the risk of the entity, which we measure with the unlevered beta. We hypothesize that the entities, which considered the R&D investments as costs, are the riskiest ones due to the higher probability that insiders carried out earnings management. Our results confirm such hypothesis. This paper could have implications for academics and standard setters that could learn that behind accounting discretion, insiders could opportunistically behave against outsiders.
N.B: Copia ad uso personale. È vietata la riproduzione (totale o parziale) dell'opera con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata e la sua messa a disposizione di terzi, sia in forma gratuita sia a pagamento.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.