According to the European University Association, nowadays financial sustainability is one of the key challenges for Higher Education Institutions. The financial sustainability of public universities is threatened by cutbacks in public funding and by society’s growing demand for improvements to the volume and quality of services provided. A recent reform in Italy has determined that universities are required to move to accrual accounting, starting from the assumption that this system responds more effectively to issues relating to financial stability control. This paper evaluates whether the new financial reporting system is better placed to represent the universities’ conditions of financial sustainability. Moreover, specific measures have been developed to investigate which financial strategies, if any, have been adopted in Italian universities to react to the new competitive context. Working in collaboration with practitioners from the HE sector, the research team developed a framework based on specific financial ratios to assess the financial sustainability of these institutions and to analyse their financial strategies. The findings reveal that, notwithstanding some common features, there are significant variations between Italian universities and they are addressing the new challenges with a range of different approaches.

Gender equity is a topic of significant interest for universities, who are called upon to plan strategies and measures to increase gender equality in line with international policies. With a qualitative methodology based on manual content analysis, the paper aims to understand whether and how this report could positively assess a university’s actions for reaching SDG 5. This study’s results show that the CRUI guidelines can be used by universities to disclose gender policies that may be of interest to stakeholders, and can also be synthesized in THE ranking, increasing university visibility. The present study could be helpful for universities, regulatory bodies, policy makers, and agency rankings to help them identify the most relevant gender items on which to focus their attention.

The study examines the effectiveness of IFRS 8, effective since 2009, in relation to both the magnitude of segment disclosures and the firms' characteristics that might affect the disaggregated disclosure policies decisions, on Italian listed companies during the period 2008-2012. The results show that on average, the new standard did not lead to relevant changes in the segment disclosures as previously stated under IAS 14R, thus demonstrating inconsistency with the expectations of the IASB. In addition, we demonstrated, by employing a fixed-effect regression, that the magnitude of segment disclosure is negatively associated with growth rate, size, profitability and ownership diffusion. The present study contributes to the extant literature in terms of the PIR review, discussing the effectiveness of IFRS 8 some years after adoption, and not merely considering the first year, where the results may be affected by the learning curve effect in countries less familiar with Anglo-Saxon accounting.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the risk measures and the volatility of total comprehensive income (TCI), other comprehensive income (OCI), and single OCI components in the European context. Previous studies only cover reporting jurisdictions such as the United States and Canada but never the EU. Based on these premises, this research uses a sample of 166 listed banks, selected from 15 European countries. The results show that there is a significant positive association between the stock return volatility and the volatility of TCI, of OCI, and some of the single OCI components. This study contributes to the international debate on the risk relevance of TCI and its components, observing, in addition to previous research, the association not only between the risk measures and the volatility of TCI and OCI but also between the risk measures and the volatility of single OCI components.