Corporate governance has long been the subject of interest for researchers in business administration. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices decided by boards of directors are now a key issue in the decision‐making process of companies. The relationship between the governance structure and CSR policies is crucial to defining the companies' strategic view. In this paper, we identify how the characteristics of corporate governance impact CSR disclosure. Our findings show that a large board of directors reduces the probability of adhering to practices that involve stakeholders more closely in company activity, while companies with more independent directors have a higher level of stakeholder protection almost by definition. Thus, there is a need for additional ways of involving stakeholders in company activity. Our results also reveal that an overlap between the roles of the CEO and the board chairman is an undesirable influence on a CSR report.

Purpose Following the contingency perspective, this paper aims to examine if a good corporate governance structure is able to reduce earnings management made through related party transactions. The authors expect that a high-quality corporate governance influences private benefit acquisition and reduces the positive association between related party transactions and earnings management. Design/methodology/approach A two-stage least squares instrumental variable approach is used to further address endogeneity concerns in this study. The model is organized into three parts: the construction of the corporate governance indicator, the first stage regression to compute the predicted corporate governance indicator and the second stage regression (ordinary least squares multivariate regressions) to analyze the relationship between related party transactions and earnings management. The analysis focuses on a sample of Italian listed companies over the period 2007-2012. Findings The study finds that the interaction between sales-related party transactions and corporate governance is negatively associated with abnormal accruals, signaling that corporate governance quality reduces the positive association between sales-related party transactions and earnings management, consistently with the contingency perspective. Originality/value The research contributes to literature by empirically testing the assumption of contingency perspective. In particular, the results provide new insights to the academic community, underlying that good corporate governance mechanism helps to reduce earnings management behavior through related party transactions.

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Corruption is a proxy of low detection of opportunistic behavior and may influence managers' decisions. Considering an international scenario, the study investigates whether income shifting between subsidiaries and parents is emphasized for subsidiaries in less corrupted countries. Data refer to groups with the parent company in France, German, Italy, Spain, or UK. Using financial data, tax rate, and country corruption level, linear regression is carried out to determine the impact of corruption on income shifting process. Using anomie theory, this study offers additional evidence that corruption is a symptom of instability and influences managers' decision‐making processes. Managers tend to shift income towards less corrupted countries and so, high bribery reduces the incentive to attract foreign income. These results are novel given we focus on European international groups and not merely on single firms. They confirm the positive effects of responsible business and the attractiveness of countries that control for corruption.

Research advances in the last decades have allowed the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) concepts in several industrial application scenarios, leading to the so-called Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT (IIoT). The Industry 4.0 has the ambition to revolutionize industry management and business processes, enhancing the productivity of manufacturing technologies through field data collection and analysis, thus creating real-time digital twins of industrial scenarios. Moreover, it is vital for companies to be as "smart" as possible and to adapt to the varying nature of the digital supply chains. This is possible by leveraging IoT in Industry 4.0 scenarios. In this paper, we describe the renovation process, guided by things2i s.r.l., a cross-disciplinary engineering-economic spin-off company of the University of Parma, which a real manufacturing industry is undergoing over consecutive phases spanning a few years. The first phase concerns the digitalization of the control quality process, specifically related to the company's production lines. The use of paper sheets containing different quality checks has been made smarter through the introduction of a digital, smart, and Web-based application, which is currently supporting operators and quality inspectors working on the supply chain through the use of smart devices. The second phase of the IIoT evolution-currently ongoing concerns both digitalization and optimization of the production planning activity, through an innovative Web-based planning tool. The changes introduced have led to significant advantages and improvement for the manufacturing company, in terms of: (i) impressive cost reduction; (ii) better products quality control; (iii) real-time detection and reaction to supply chain issues; (iv) significant reduction of the time spent in planning activity; and (v) resources employment optimization, thanks to the minimization of unproductive setup times on production lines. These two renovation phases represent a basis for possible future developments, such us the integration of sensor-based data on the operational status of production machines and the currently available warehouse supplies. In conclusion, the Industry 4.0-based ongoing digitization process guided by things2i allows to continuously collect heterogeneous Human-to-Things (H2T) data, which can be used to optimize the partner manufacturing company as a whole entity.