Biscotti Anna Maria, D’Amico Eugenio, Vinci Sabato / Financial Reporting / 1-2019

According to literature on the value relevance of intellectual capital (IC), a gap between the market and book value of a company larger than one indicates the contribution of IC resources (mostly off-balance sheet) to the value creation potential of a firm as perceived by investors. In Italy, with the introduction of Legislative Decree no. 32/2007 (by which the EU Directive 2003/51/CE was partially implemented into Italian law), companies are encouraged (for the first time in Italy) to disclse in the management commentary for the fiscla year-end of 2008 and for subsequent years non-financial information about employee matters. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether a more virtuous corporate disclosure behaviour on non-financial IC information relating to the human capital significantly contributes to better explain (more than other IC components) the market-to-book value gap, playing a unique role in the market valuation process of high-tech companies. Moreover, a greater disclosure on IC appears to be determinant in improving the accuracy of market assessment of high-tech companies characterised by higher IC performance.

Quagli Alberto / Financial Reporting / 2-2018

This issue is the last of my editorship. After ten years (2009-2018), Financial Reporting changes editor, from me to Professor Giunta, University of Florence, and I will remain as associate editor of this journal. Let me say a few words on my engagement with this journal, just to keep the memory of our actions alive. We are getting old, you know…
I have served as the editor of Financial Reporting since its creation, founding the journal together with a group of dear colleagues in 2009. At that time, we intended to develop a new room for the scientific debate about the financial communication of companies to markets, investors, and stakeholders. Our aims were to create the first Italian ournal in financial accounting and communication with double blind reviewing process, to launch an annual workshop as a meeting point of our small but lively community, and to overcome some old bad practices of the academic life, where sometimes the name of the author counts more than the content of the paper. We strongly believe in the academia as an open community, collaboration and working groups as a way of life, even if all the public incentives reward essentially the individual and identifiable, contributions. We rapidly began to open the journal to foreign authors with the use of both Italian and English in published articles, and since 2013 we have decided to move to English as official language of the journal to promote the European ambitions of Financial Reporting. In 2011, we favoured the acquisition of the journal by FrancoAngeli, the current publisher, from IFAF. In this ten years, we promoted workshops and seminars together with the IAAER (Venice, 2013), the IASB (London, 2015), and parallel sessions during the annual congresses of AIDEA and SIDREA. We launched the website of the journal in 2012, and have just renewed it this year. FR counts now 10 annual congresses (Pisa, 2010; Firenze, 2011, Napoli Parthenope, 2012;
Roma LUISS e Sapienza, 2013, Verona, 2014; Grenoble, 2015; Genova, 2016; Parma, 2017, Bologna, 2018 and the next scheduled congress in Turin, 2019). We publish a quarterly newsletter and we recently created the promising ENLAAJ (European network of local academic accountancy journals) together with other 10 European academic journals. FR was ranked as a “C journal” in the last VQR (2011-2014), which is one of the best “Italian” journals of our discipline. We have devoted considerable efforts in promoting studies on the Italian context, both in public and
private companies, and we took very seriously the scope of the journal, focused on external communication to markets through financial reporting. Our scope have never included papers on management accounting or inspired by a purely historical perspective. Under my editorship, this journal published 27 issues. We contributed to the diffusion of the culture of reviewing in our Italian academy. The growth of the journal interested some relevant publishing groups such as Taylor & Francis and Wiley, which offered to include it their archives, and I hope that
in the next future Financial Reporting will succeed in including its issues in the most important databases of scientific articles, available in the worldwide academic libraries. Now Financial Reporting has all the conditions to ask for the inclusion in the Scopus list of journals. All the above results to the readers could seem satisfying for a new, greenfield journal. Actually, I do not feel completely satisfied. I am worried for the rush to the A journals. Obviously, you could say, FR is not an A journal, how can I be satisfied? Honestly, my main troubles come from this growing bibliometric trend, in which the venue of publication seems more important than the concepts and theses developed in the papers. Thus, more conceptual approaches – maybe less quantitative but able to open new perspectives – are more and more penalized, not to mention the limited number of studies on national or European contexts compared to those on international or American settings. There is a great need of original ideas, close to the practice, even if not completely mature. I hope that the new editor will see all those things getting better.
I want to thank all assistant editors of these years: Giovanna Michelon, Claudia Gabbioneta, Monica Veneziani, and Michela Cordazzo. FR has seen the growth of their careers along the years. They are all professors. Very
good!
See you around, somewhere; we are living in a small world.

Mechelli Alessandro, Sforza Vincenzo, Stefanoni Alessandra, Cimini Riccardo / Financial Reporting / 2-2018

This paper investigates the value relevance of the fair valur hierarchy disclosed for financial instruments through a sample of 97 financial entities listed over the period 2011-2016 i the stock markets of 23 Eurpoean countries. Its main objectives are threefold. First, by analysing the European setting, the paper means to study the value relevance of the fair value hierarchy to judge the choice of the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB) to extend the disclosure of the hierarchy to all the assets and liabilities. Second, the paper aims to evaluate the choice of abandning management intent as a criterion for the classification and measurement of financial instruments investigating the effect that such an intent has on the value relevance of the fair value hierarchy. Finally, by studying the effect that exposure to risks has on the value relevance of the fair value hierarchical levels, the paper plans to investigate the implications that the disclosure of the hierarchy could have on the rules of Basel 3 capital adequacy. Forumulating three different research hypotheses, the findings validate them prviding evidence that the value relevance of fair value measurement depends on the source of inputs used to estimate fair value and that both management intent and the risk intensity of the asset book only affect the value relevance of the less reliable fair value estimates. These results are useful for standard setters and regulators. Actually, for the investors decisions, they suggest the importance of disclosing the fair value hierarchy for all the assets and liabilities as required by IFRS 13, as well as teh advantage of replacing in IFRS 9 the management intent criterion.