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We investigate the case of Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Italy trying to understand if key performance indicators obtained from the financial statement are able to predict possible distress in a company with enough time to take some corrective actions. In order to test the hypotheses, a nonparametric supervised classification algorithm has been applied to a random sample of 100 non-listed SMEs, considering 50 companies that filed for bankruptcy during the period 2000-2011 and 50 companies still active on the market at the end of 2011. Results describe the Italian picture for SMEs during an economic crisis period. They show that, for the Italian case, it is possible to predict with enough time (4-5 years prior to failure) a distress situation in a firm through classification methods. Anyway, these methods are not predicting the health of a company but the possibility of the firm to access the credit system. The results are limited to the Italian SMEs context which is quite particular if compared with other countries in Europe. The dataset is limited in size but has been chosen to be representative of non-listed Italian companies.

International audience; In the food industry, thermal treatments are generally an essential step to increase the shelf life of the products. This is especially true for milk and dairy products in which heat treatments help to eliminate pathogenic organisms, minimize microbiological development, and improve some sensory properties. However, they can also induce biochemical, physico-chemical, and sensory changes in foods, and then adversely affect the final quality of the products. To assess the quality of milk and dairy products during heating, some non-destructive techniques exist. In this article, the application of spectroscopic non-destructive techniques (fluorescence, infrared, NMR) is analyzed to point out the pertinence by using them as tools to monitor milk and dairy product quality changes during heating. An overview of the last studies on the effect of different conventional and emerging methods of milk and dairy product heating on biochemical, physico-chemical, and sensory quality is also presented, as well as the perspectives of research in this topic.

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Mountain karst ponds are sensitive environments, hosting complex trophic networks where amphibians play a major role, often as top predators. The diet of the Italian crested newt (Triturus carnifex) is still poorly known for populations occupying mountain karst ponds. These are traditionally used as livestock&rsquo, s watering points, leading to water pollution due to excreta and wading behavior. The aim of this paper is to understand the relationship between T. carnifex diet composition, assessed through the stomach flushing technique, and physical and chemical characteristics in mountain ponds, focusing on parameters altered by livestock pressure, such as ammonium concentration and dissolved oxygen. The high diversity of prey items found within the newts&rsquo, gut contents confirms the generalist diet even in mountain ponds. The number of prey taxa, their relative abundance and Shannon&ndash, Wiener diversity index show variations among the sampled sites, related to livestock organic pollution. Moreover, we report the very first European records of microplastic items in amphibians&rsquo, stomach content, which also represent the first evidence for Caudata worldwide. Our findings suggest that livestock pressure directly influences T. carnifex diet and highlight that the emerging issue of plastics is a threat even in remote high-altitude environments.

We considered the case of small-medium enterprises (SMEs) in Italy introducing a new classifier to predict bankruptcy up to eight years prior to failure. We considered a stratified random sample of 100 non-listed Italian SMEs, 50 of which filed for bankruptcy during the years 2000 to 2011. Results suggest that the proposed method more than holds its own when compared with standard non-parametric classification techniques. The performance of the proposed method based on recognition rate, sensitivity and specificity shows that the proposed technique is effective in predicting the failure of a firm up to eight years prior to the event. The high specificity makes the proposed technique very effective as a warning signal to determine if a firm is in distress with a sufficient enough time to take proper actions. The performance assessment has been achieved via cross-validation to get unbiased estimates of the performances.

Social Sciences and Humanities research is divided across a wide array of disciplines, sub- disciplines and languages. While this specialisation makes it possible to investigate the extensive variety of SSH topics, it also leads to a fragmentation that prevents SSH research from reaching its full potential. Use and reuse of research is suboptimal, interdisciplinary collaboration possibilities are often missed partially because of missing standards and referential keys between disciplines. Often, the reuse of data may paradoxically complicate a relevant sorting of data and a trust relationship between researchers. As a result, societal, economic and academic impacts are limited. Conceptually, there is a wealth of transdisciplinary collaborations, but in practice there is a need to help researchers and research institutions to connect them and support them, to prepare the research data for these overarching approaches and to make them findable and usable. The TRIPLE (Targeting Researchers through Innovative Practices and Linked Exploration) project is a practical answer to the above issues, as it aims at designing and developing the European discovery platform dedicated to Social Sciences and Humanities resources. Funded under the European Commission program INFRAEOSC-02-2019 “Prototyping new innovative services”, thanks to a consortium of 19 partners, TRIPLE will develop a full multilingual and multicultural solution for the discovery and the reuse of Social Sciences and Humanities resources. The project started in October 2019 for a duration of 42 months thanks to European funding of 5.6 million €.

Purpose The chapter builds on the literature of Agency and Signalling Theories to analyse the corporate governance factors associated with the voluntary decision to prepare an Integrated Report according to the International Framework promoted by the IIRC. Methodology/approach The chapter is based on the results of a probit regression run with regard to a sample of 35 companies that joined the Pilot Programme in 2011 and 137 similar companies that did not. Findings The analysis of two samples of European companies reveals that adhesion to the IR Pilot Programme is positively related to the gender diversity and size of the board. Research limitations Further research is required in order to study the differences between listed and non-listed companies in terms of variables affecting the adoption of the Framework and to increase the time range of our study. In addition, it would be interesting to include other variables capturing different aspects other than corporate governance, since the decision to join the Programme, as the results of our analysis have shown, may also be influenced by other factors, such as strategy decisions and communication policies. Originality/value The chapter adds to the existing literature by showing the main governance characteristics that impact the decision to adhere to the IR Pilot Programme. It is also important to the existing literature regarding the role played by gender diversity in corporate governance mechanisms and CSR policies.

The study investigates the relationship between family involvement in the governance of Italian listed companies and earnings quality (EQ). Family firms set incentives to extract private benefits (‘entrenchment’ effect), but, they also contribute to higher alignment between owners and managers (‘alignment’ effect). The literature shows mixed results about the relationship between EQ and family firms. We argue that family involvement in the governance affects EQ. The empirical evidence shows that in the Italian context, there is higher EQ in case of higher family involvement in the board, but only if the CEO is not belonging to the controlling family. On the contrary, in case of a family CEO, the higher family involvement in the board increases his entrenchment, reducing EQ. The results are valuable because we find that EQ in family firms is affected both by family ownership and by the attitude of the family toward governance practices.

Cross-ownership and interlocking directorates are two typical features of Italian capitalism involving both banks and non-financial companies. It is possible to refer to this phenomenon as “bank-firm connection”. The paper investigates the effects of “bank-firm connection” on the conditions of credit relationship. In particular, we find that the “bank-firm connection” lowers the leverage ratio of non financial companies, while it increases their cost of debt.

Timely Corporate failure prediction is a major issue in today’s economy especially considering the financial crisis that has affected the World Economy in the last decade. Any prediction technique must be reliable (good recognition rate, sensitivity and specificity), robust and able to give predictions with a sufficient time lag to allow for corrective actions. In this paper we have considered the case of Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Italy during the 2008 crisis, introducing a non-parametric classification algorithm to predict corporate failure based on financial indicators up to 8 years in advance.

The paper aims at analysing the effect of women serving on the boards of directors, especially after the introduction of gender minority (Law 120/2011 and Consob n. 18098/2012), and the network ties on boardrooms on the overall firms’ performance in the Italian context. Gender minority is defined as the percentage of women on the board of directors, whereas the network ties represent companies which are connected through shared board members. To do this, we selected a sample of industrial Italian listed companies during the period 2011-2013 and we downloaded the mandatory reports of corporate governance of each firm in our sample time period in order to extract the components of the board of directors and their characteristics. We performed a set of regression analysis to evaluate whether the participation of women in the firm’s board of directors and the presence of connections among boardrooms enhance the financial performance measured through Tobin’s Q and Return On Asset (ROA). Empirical results contribute to extend scientific literature about this topic and to provide interesting practical contributions on the role of gender minority and the connections among companies on firms’ performance. Parallel, this research develops topics related to text mining (that is the automatic extraction of quantitative information from text-documents) referring to all the firms’ disclosures, produced in the Italian language.

This study investigates the impact of Corporate Social Performance on stock prices of Italian listed companies. The main stream of literature focuses on the relation between CSR and financial performance, showing contradictory results that still feed a debate, which has not yet reached a unanimous and widely shared position. Concerning the selection of the measure of performance, we chose stock prices as a proxy for financial performance, in order to measure the perception and reaction of financial markets to the companies’ socially responsible behaviors. Using different social performance indicators concerning environment, community and employment activities, we found evidence that a good social performance has a negative influence on stock prices in the Italian Stock Exchange Market. This phenomenon is particularly evident if the environmental strategies of the Italian listed companies are considered. Hence, the Italian investors perceive these practices as avoidable expenses reducing shareholders’ income and companies’ value and recognize a negative market premium, in terms of lower stock prices, to socially responsible enterprises. This evidence is consistent with the peculiarities of the Italian capitalism structure, which, because of its backwardness in CSR topics and related issues, seems to be not yet mature enough to evaluate appropriately the value of these policies

Corporate failure prediction is a mayor issue in today’s economy. Any prediction technique must be reliable (good recognition rate, sensitivity and specificity), robust and able to give predictions with a sufficient time lag to allow for corrective actions. In this paper we have considered the case of Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Italy trying to determine which dimension, in terms of performance indicators, best suits this goal. We have considered three of the most robust and diffused classification techniques on data over a period of 8 years prior to failure. The results tend to suggest that, for the Italian SME system, profitability ratios are always relevant in predicting corporate failure (both in the short and in the medium-long run), while leverage and liquidity indicators, affecting the financial dimension of the company, tend to add information in predicting a possible risk of default only in the medium-long run.

The Linked Open Data Portal (LODPortal) is an open source application for the Digital Humanities which has been developed within the European Project (CIP-ICT-PSP) Agora -- Scholarly Open Access Research in European Philosophy. Although it is in aprototypal stage of development, it presents an innovative use of Linked data technologies applied to the Digital Humanities domain. By combining thousands of resources coming from different Digital Libraries, thanks to the use of Semantic Web technologies it offers to Scholars novel tools to create, reuse and visualize research data and results. In particular, the LODPortal gathers and indexes resources coming from twelve Digital Libraries and the Linked Data cloud (such as DBPedia and Freebase) and includes a module based on Pundit, enabling automatic entity extraction, thanks to the service DANDELION, and manual semantic enrichment. Based on the semantic indexing, the navigation interface offers advanced visualizations such as the Timeline, the people graph and a map of places.

This study is based on the analysis of Nobes (2006) and Zeff (2007), demonstrating that different countries tend to adopt IFRS through the implementation of the options that are closely related to their culture. In a sample of 189 publicly traded firms from 7 different countries, we provide a first evidence of the application of some specific IAS/IFRS standards worldwide. IFRS, like any other set of accounting standards, offer firms substantial discretion (different options) in applying the standards. Our descriptive statistics show that, on average, countries tend to implement the options more suitable for their accounting, legal and tax culture, making international differences within IFRS survive. This study wants to be a call for future research regarding the IAS/IFRS adoption worldwide.

This paper discusses the application of Pundit, a novel semantic annotation tool, in the case study of Burckhardt's correspondence. In this context the occurrences of persons and places names as well as references to works of art in the letters are being semantically annotated and linked to the Web of Data. Such an experiment has a two fold goal. The first one is validating and iteratively improving Pundit as a tool for creating and making explicit the information "hidden" in the letters. The second is to investigate how such knowledge can be presented and visualized to be actually useful for scholars themselves. Leveraging on Semantic Web technologies and on the Open Annotation data model, scholars' collaboratively created annotations are coherently merged with the metadata already present in the DL and exposed via REST APIs to build a number of alternative ways of visualizing the knowledge graph. We claim this approach fosters a "virtuous circle" where the new knowledge produced by scholars can, in turn, become the starting point for new researches. This paper discusses the preliminary results of this ongoing project, presenting requirements and a first visualization prototype.

The study investigates whether and how earnings management depends on board monitoring, focusing, in particular, on two aspects: the role of independent directors and the presence of an audit committee in the Italian context. Empirical evidence about the topic does not come to unique results. In fact, on the one hand, independent directors and audit committees, being independent on management influence, are able to better protect shareholders from managerial opportunism (Fama and Jensen, 1983, Weisbach, 1988; Rosenstein and Wyatt, 1990; Byrd and Hickman, 1992; McWilliams and Sen, 1997), but, on the other hand, outside independent directors do not necessarily produce a better performance (Bhagat and Black, 1999; Klein, 1998; Agrawal and Knoeber, 1996) because the boards are “controlled” by management having better information than outside independent directors (Berle and Means 1932; Mace 1971).The purpose of the paper is providing an evidence about the impact of independent directors and audit committee on earnings management of Italian listed companies during the period 2002-2007. A regression analysis statistically examines this correlation. Our dependent variable is an earnings management metric based on the modified Jones model (Dechow, 1995). The results suggest that both independent directors and the existence of an audit committee mitigate earnings management. Governance and control variables are considered in terms of CEO powers and companies size and profitability.

This study investigates the impact of Corporate Social Performance on stock prices of Italian listed companies. The main stream of literature focuses on the relation between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance, showing contradictory results that still feed a debate, which has not yet reached a unanimous and widely shared position. As far as the measure of performance is concerned, we selected stock prices as a proxy for financial performance. The idea behind this choice is the attempt to measure the perception and reaction of financial markets to the companies’ socially responsible behaviors. Using different social performance indicators concerning environment, community and employment activities, we found evidence that a good social performance has a negative influence on stock prices in the Italian Stock Exchange Market. This phenomenon is particularly evident if the environmental strategies of the Italian listed companies are considered. Hence, the Italian investors perceive these practices as avoidable expenses reducing shareholders’ income and companies’ value and recognize a negative market premium, in terms of lower stock prices, to socially responsible enterprises. This evidence is consistent with the peculiarities of the Italian capitalism structure, which, because of its backwardness in CSR topics and related issues, seems to be not yet mature enough to evaluate appropriately the value of these policies.

The study investigates the relation between family governance and firms transparency in the Italian context where family firms are very spread. The literature about the impact of family ownership on earnings quality (EQ) highlights a twofold effect. On the one hand, there is the view that family firms are less efficient because controlling shareholders have incentives to exploit private benefits at the expenses of minority shareholders (Fama and Jensen 1983; Morck et al. 1998, Shleifer and Vishny 1997, Bebchuk, 1999), so that they have incentives to bad quality reporting (Francis et al., 2005, Fan and Wong, 2002). This can be considered an 'entrenchment effect'. On the other hand, ownership concentration generates more effective monitoring by controlling owners (Demsetz and Lehn 1985, Shleifer and Vishny 1986) and families have incentives to high EQ to preserve family's name. This is called 'alignment effect' (Wang, 2005). Our explanation is that the effects of family ownership on EQ depend on the attitude of the family towards corporate governance practices, because these show the family's incentives to good reputation. The purpose of this paper is providing an evidence about the impact of family ownership and governance practices on the earnings quality of Italian companies. The period of the analysis is 2001-2006. A regression analysis statistically examines this correlation. Our dependent variable is an earnings quality metric based on the Dechow-Dichev's model (Dechow-Dichev, 2002). Governance practices are considered in terms of board composition, board independence, CEO characteristics and powers. Control variables are mainly size, profitability, indebtness.

Agency costs, deriving from the separation between ownership and control, affect whatever company model. In case of firms with dispersed ownership (the public companies), the classic agency conflict regards the relation between shareholders and managers. In case of family firms the classic agency conflicts are mitigated thanks to reduced separation between ownership and control, but there are other types of agency conflicts, moreover between family shareholders and minority ones. This paper focuses on the relation between agency costs and ownership structure, in the specific perspective of minority shareholders, providing a first empirical evidence of the proposition that family ownership reduces the agency costs of equity and has a negative effect on the equity risk perceived by the market. The analysis statistically compares family and non-family firms, sorted from Italian listed companies, in any sector with a significant presence of family business, to get evidence of family's ownership impact on equity cost of capital.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is getting an increasingly important issue for economic agents all over the world, due to a new attention to all the aspects of firms activities and their relationships with stakeholders. Also in Italy, the number of firms that prepare voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports (e.g. sustainability reports, environmental reports, environmental and social reports or corporate social responsibility reports) is increasing. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the voluntary disclosure about Corporate Social Responsibility on firms stock prices of Italian listed companies in order to analyze if it can somehow contribute to increase the stock market prices. Our empirical analysis will test the relation, during a period of three years, between corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and firms stock prices, considering a sample of Italian listed companies.

In the last years banks and firms relationship in Italy has experienced deep changes due to a new revised national and international regulation and to an increasing globalization of economic environment. These evolutions imply a new bank-firm relationship with a deeper disclosure, in a perspective of partnership between them. In this scenario, Basel 1 and 2 accords have been contributing to revise bank-firm relationship, moreover in the specific perspective of small-medium sized firms. In Italy, the evolution of bank-firm relation has been also influenced by an intensive banking system restructuring process, characterized by big mergers and small local banks aggregations. This paper focuses on bank-firm relation impact on small-medium sized firms financial reporting quality. The analysis empirically examines some proxies for earnings quality for a sample of Italian small-medium sized firms over 10 years period. Earnings quality metrics are based on the relation between working capital accruals and cash flows, following Dechow and Dichev (2002) approach. Across these metrics we will perform a cross-sectional analysis on the relation between earnings quality and some variables regarding banks and firms governance, controlling for regulation changes and other variables such as size, sector etc.

Evidence on accounting irregularities and frauds has shown how corporate governance systems in modern economies are far from preventing the risk of misleading financial information. This paper has the purpose to study the main features of some well-known italian and international accounting frauds, to find some relations between corporate governance rules, control systems, accounting regulation and the frauds themselves. Deeply, each case of accounting fraud will be analysed through the following grid of main features: Origin, causes and incentives - Accounting irregularities causes, incentives and effects on firms results; - Purpose and interests pursued with them; Development Process - Time extension of frauds implementation and growth of dimension over time; - People involved in and acknowledged of the fraud; Implementation tools - Voices subject to manipulation and typologies of accounting tools for irregularities implementation; - The attitude of openly violating or just eluding rules and accounting standard. Internal and External controls - External and internal auditors effectiveness and role; - Ownership and management decision-making rules. The final purpose is to identify the relation between frauds characteristics, economic and legal systems and corporate governance practices in different countries. to highlight the effects of contest variables, regulation and control systems on the genesis and development of accounting fraud.