Antonella Silvestri

Direct and Indirect Effects of Human Capital on Firm Value: Evidence from Italian Companies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether information on intellectual capital (IC) is value relevant for investors and the role played by the single components of IC (human capital, organizational capital, relational capital) in creating firm value. Design/methodology/approach –The Ohlson model (1995) has been employed to investigate the relationship between the current accounting measures (book value and earnings) and future measures of profitability, proxied by IC. The value added intellectual coefficient (VAIC™) approach is used to determine the firm’s efficiency in using IC resources. The sample analysis analyzed is constituted of financial sector companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange for the period 2006-2008. Findings – The findings fully confirm the existence of a positive relationship between accounting values and market value on the one hand and IC components as measured by VAIC™ and market value on the other. Results show that investors attach more value relevance to human capital efficiency (HCE) than to structural capital efficiency (SCE) and that HCE plays an indirect role in the relation between IC and market value. Research limitations/implications – The paper is focused on one sector (financial) and one country (Italy). The focus on the entire financial sector allows us to validate results from an Italian perspective and to extend them for similar banking structures in other countries, and to favor comparisons with other similar studies. Practical implications –The main implications for financial company managers are that, when developing a strategy aimed at strengthening IC, they should consider that human capital plays an indirect part with regard to the other components and that each investment in one of the IC subcategories should not be evaluated in isolation but in relation to its interactions. Originality/value –The article realizes a fusion between value relevance and IC literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that examines the relationship between VAIC™ and the market value of the Italian financial sector using an Ohlson model modified to include IC information, comprehensive of the human capital indirect effect. Post print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing) version of the article published in Journal of Human Resource Costing and Accounting Beyond the journal formatting, please note that there could be minor changes from this document to the final published version This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2187427). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

A research template to evaluate the degree of accountability of integrated reporting: a case study

Purpose The scope of the study is to analyze an Italian family firm operating in the transformation and marketing of durum wheat to investigate the degree of accountability of the integrated reporting (IR) disclosed by the organization. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a case study approach proposing a specific research template to evaluate the implementation of IR depicting the role of three main dimensions: stakeholder involvement, business model and integration. Findings The paper enriches theoretical conceptualization of the implementation of IR proposing a new conceptual model that adds empirical findings to the literature on IR and at the same time addresses the call for studies of Dumay et al. (2016) to engage more with practice and development on IR. Research limitations/implications The use of a specific research framework constitutes both the main strength of the paper and also its main limit, as the dimensions of the framework have been chosen by the authors, and the observations and conclusions are based on the authors’ analysis under an interpretative approach. Practical implications The implementation of the same research framework to other organizational IR documents could allow comparisons to be expressed on the quality of the IR disclosed by different organizations and on the same organization in different periods of time. Originality/value The main originality of this paper is the creation and the employment of a specific template to analyze the degree of accountability of the case study selected representing a non-listed Italian company operating in the food industry.

Overcoming the additive property of value added intellectual capital (VAIC™) methodology

The paper has the aim of overcoming the additive property of the VAIC™ model in order to take into consideration the synergies among different IC components. Hence, the paper proposes a new formulation of the VAIC™ methodology, enriched with a term which measures the IC interaction (interacted term). This improved VAIC™ method, interacted VAIC, has been tested on the Italian financial sector. The findings show that the interacted VAIC outperforms basic VAIC™.

Ethical strategic alliances for the sustainable recovering of a territory

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze a case study of an ethical strategic alliance operating in a depressed territory belonging to the South of Italy, with the aim to investigate whether an alliance guided by ethic principles could be effective in recovering a territory while pursuing, at the same time, economic aims for the alliance itself and for the whole territory. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a case study approach. The analyses of the case data, including in-depth interviews and documentary evidence, interpreted by the authors and supported by literature review, allow for the main research question to be addressed: “Could ethical networks contribute to recover a territory?”. Findings The case analysis delivers new insights into the relationships between business and ethics. The findings also provide evidence that it is possible, even in a depressed area, to conjugate ethics and business with reciprocal advantages for the organizations and the territory, in the light of the creed of the Magna Grecia, kalokagathia (the good and the beautiful). Social implications The findings of the GOEL strategic alliance provide evidence of the role that could be played by networks in supporting social innovations, thus highlighting clear implications for policy makers, as there is still scarce empirical evidence available to inform governments on how they can influence, support and facilitate the formation of networks. Originality/value This is one of the few studies adopting an ethical perspective in studying alliances and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first study pursuing the aim to investigate how and whether an ethical network can succeed in recovering a depressed territory.