Intellectual Capital Disclosure: Evidence from the Italian Systemically Important Banks

The need to overcome the limitations connected with the traditional financial reporting has driven the development of intellectual capital (IC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. Such need has also highlighted the relevance of an integrated reporting, recently supported by the Directive 2014/95/EU, which makes mandatory the disclosure of non-financial information for large-sized enterprises. The chapter focusses on the disclosure of the IC issues provided by the Italian systemically important banks. To conduct our analysis, we defined a disclosure model for the IC issues and collected data from the reports available on the banks’ websites; we used a deductive content analysis, integrated by the Scott’s pi test in order to evaluate the intercoder reliability. Our findings, accordingly to prior literature, point out an incomplete IC disclosure, meaning that banks should extend the level of reporting on IC issues, and particularly they should improve the presence of forward-looking information and the quantified terms of IC elements

An assessment of the Accounting Perspective on Intellectual Capital and some results from the European Union

The work reports the use of two financial indicators of intellectual and human capital and their empirical findings from the study of European Union companies. The authors use the VAIC indicator (similar to the earlier chapter) and the impact intellectual and human capital has on firm financial performances. They report that the impact is not consistent among samples and business performance indicators in terms of both significance and sign of coefficients. The second model used is a modification of, and a partial repetition and validation of, the method originally developed by Olhson. The authors report that the indicators of structural capital and human capital are always significant, suggesting that this information is relevant for investors that operate on the European stock markets. This chapter is a worthy example of the use of two quantitative methods when conducting a rigorous financial analysis of intellectual capital and human capital, suggesting to researchers and practitioners that different methods and tools have very different validities for predicting future outcomes