This study aims at exploring the effect of sustainability engagement on earnings management (EM) practices with particular reference to the Italian context in the year 2018, after the implementation of Legislative Decree No. 254/2016 on the disclosure of non-financial information. This is in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promoted by United Nations in 2015 and specifically with SDG 12 and relative target 12.6 focusing on the adoption of sustainable practices and the integration of sustainability information into reporting on the behalf of companies. We analyzed a sample of 60 companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange. Our results suggest that there is a slight negative relationship between sustainability engagement and earnings management practices. Indeed, our evidence shows that companies characterized by higher level of sustainability engagement are less prone to advance EM practices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research to investigate the effect of the sustainability engagement on EM practices with reference to a sample of Italian listed companies.

The numerous cases of business disruptions, involving opportunism and accounting fraud by shareholder, directors and managers, that have occurred in different countries over the past two decades along with institutional and context phenomena and with the rise of the 2008 financial crisis, have refocused the attention of academia, professionals and world policy makers on the disclosure processes used by companies and on corporate governance mechanisms. This paper, after a systematic description of the investigated issues – ownership structure, ownership concentrations and largest shareholders examines the relationship between ownership structure or concentrated ownership and earnings management in the Italian context, characterized by concentrated ownership and the dominance of the largest shareholder who exercises typically significant influences on management decisions directly or indirectly. Existing literature suggests, in an unequivocal way, the effect of the ownership structure on earnings management. According to some researchers, the ownership structure decreases the incentive to manage earnings. Others have the opposite opinion, they think ownership structure on earnings management provides the opportunity and incentive to manipulate earnings. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to analyse whether, in the Italian context, a firm’s ownership structure, measured with several variables, exacerbates or alleviates earnings management. Using a sample of 300 non-financial listed Italian firms from 2011 to 2013. We find that discretionary accruals, as a proxy for earnings management, is negatively related to ownership concentration and the second largest shareholder and positively related to first largest shareholder. The study’s results suggest that ownership concentration improve the quality of annual earnings, in a particular agency setting, by reducing the levels of earnings management.

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between the financial crisis and earnings management. Despite the wealth of research examining earnings management, we still have much to learn about the effects of macroeconomic factors on accounting discretional decisions; the recent financial crises may be one of such factors. Particularly, this study aims at investigating whether, in the Italian context, the precarious macroeconomic conditions and the consequent difficulties suffered by listed companies have constituted an incentive to implement earnings management or not. The research is based on a sample of 89 non-financial listed Italian companies and an investigation period (2005-2016) split out into three different sub-periods: a pre-crisis period (2005-2008), a crisis period (2009-2012) and a post-crisis period (2013-2016). The research is conducted using the Beneish Model, due to its capability to identify, although on the basis of likelihood, companies that potentially adopt earnings management. The results of this study suggest an overall low presence of companies at risk of manipulation throughout the period under investigation; however, the most consistent number of such companies is recorded during the pre-crisis period.

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between ownership structures and turnaround processes in the Italian context. In fact, with the exception of the analysis of individual business cases - relating to incidents of fraud, bankruptcy and failure to rehabilitate the business, it does not seem to have been made, at the time, specific theoretical and empirical studies on the relationship between ownership structure and processes turnaround / crisis in Italian listed companies, in which the reference model is the family business, even in large companies. This research does not extend the results obtained from studies conducted in different contexts outright to Italian companies, but considers the peculiarities of the Italian model of corporate governance, characterized by concentrated ownership structure, by the low proportion of banks and institutional investors and the conflict of interests between shareholders control and minority shareholders

A PRELIMINARY EVALUATION OF THE IMPACT OF GRANT POLICIES IN APULIA IN FAVOUR OF OPERATORS IN THE TOURISM SECTOR Francesco Grimaldi Vito Arcangelo Carulli Department of Economics and Finance,...