Romilda Mazzotta

Business succession and Intellectual Capital Management in family firms

Family businesses are institutions in which two seemingly disparate social units (i.e., families and businesses) are highly integrated. This connection extends to succession across generations and while natural, this can be a difficult process. The founder, thanks to his long stay in the family business, has a substantial amount of tacit knowledge related to the firm which can often determine business success. In the succession process it is important to diffuse and manage overall knowledge, or intellectual capital, to the successor. This study attempts to contribute to the literature casting some light on the business succession in a family firm informed by an intellectual capital perspective. Starting from these theoretical principles, through a case study analysis approach, the research investigates how human and relational resources are managed in the business succession process and how the process is communicated to the external environment and therefore how small family firms can maintain and increase their competitive advantage thus reducing the risk of failure during the succession process.

Does board diversity affect firm performance? Evidence from the Italian financial sector

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of diversity in the board of directors on the performance of the listed Italian financial institutions. The sample is a data set of 177 firm-year observations covering 2011 to 2014. The performance of the firm is measured by Tobins Q while board diversity is analysed considering the percentage of female and foreign directors on the board (or their conjoint presence as a proxy of overall demographic diversity) and task-diversity is measured by board interlocking directorship and busy directors. Findings suggest that female directors have no effect on firm performance. Foreign directors and interlocking directorship have, instead, a positive statistically significant relationship with performance while we find a negative statistically significant relationship between busy directors and performance. When we consider the overall demographic diversity on the board we observe that it is positively and significantly related to the performance of the financial firm.

Board Evaluation in Italian Listed Companies

In the last decade performance evaluation of the Board of Directors has become a best practice at national and international level. Italy is an interesting area of analysis given the high concentration of ownership that characterizes companies, including listed companies. In this context the choices of governance that affect the level of disclosure, for which the expectation is to have a low level of disclosure on the practice of BE (Board Evaluation).The first purpose of this paper is to present a resume on the state of the art in terms of BE for Italian listed companies at 31st December 2012, in terms of presence/absence of the practice of disclosure and its more or less extensive disclosure. The second objective is to highlight the modality of adoption of BE and the third is to analyze the relationship between the quality of BE (measured using as a proxy the disclosure on its setting up) and corporate governance. The results reveal there are few companies that use board evaluation and that there is a relationship between BE adoption and good governance and between the quality of BE and good governance.

The Impact of Corporate Governance on Internet Financial Reporting in Concentrated Ownership Companies

In the context of agency theory this study investigates the effect of corporate governance (CG) on Internet Financial Reporting (IFR) disclosure in a concentrated ownership environment, such as Italy. We hypothesize that IFR may be explained in term of increasing transparency in order to defend minority shareholder interest, so we predict, and find, a positive association between the extent of a firm’s IFR and its CG and a negative association between IFR and ownership structure. CG is measured by ownership structure, using as a proxy the share held by the first three major shareholders and by managerial ownership, and by board composition, captured through the incidence of independent director (IND) and of a Non-Executive Chair (NEC). IFR is measured taking into consideration the content and format of information present in Investor Relations sections.