Scoring Nonfinancial Information Reporting in Italian Listed Companies: A Comparison of before and after the Legislative Decree 254/2016

Lara Tarquinio, Stefanía C. Posadas and Deborah Pedicone
Additional contact information
Lara Tarquinio: Department of Economic Studies, University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara, 65127 Pescara, Italy
Stefanía C. Posadas: Department of Economic Studies, University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara, 65127 Pescara, Italy
Deborah Pedicone: KPMG S.p.A., 20124 Milano, Italy

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-22

Abstract: Directive 2014/95/EU requires EU Member States to mandate nonfinancial disclosures for large public interest entities. The adoption of the Legislative Decree 254/2016, transposing into Italian law the EU Directive, has opened up new perspectives for research on the effects produced by regulatory requirements on nonfinancial information (NFI) in the Italian context. This paper aims to examine how the new regulation is influencing the quantity of NFI disclosed by Italian companies concerning sustainability matters required by the Directive. Content analysis is used to verify the sustainability indicators disclosed by Italian companies before and after the implementation of the Decree. A composite indicator of disclosure performance is then constructed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The results highlight a generalized reduction of indicators disclosed by companies belonging to the sample. Over the three years analysed, most companies have improved their disclosure ranking. Nevertheless, a comparison among companies having the same ranking showed a decrease in the disclosure index for the majority of them. Despite the growing attention paid by academics to Directive 95/2014/EU and its implementation in Italy, this is one of the few studies that has evaluated the effects of the Decree over three years, considering what happened after the first year of its implementation.

Keywords: nonfinancial information; Directive 2014/95/EU; Legislative Decree 254/2016; Global Reporting Initiative; principal component analysis; sustainability disclosure index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/10/4158/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/10/4158/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:10:p:4158-:d:360250

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().