Mandatory Disclosure About Environmental and Employee Matters in Italian Listed Corporate Groups' Reports

This paper analyzes the impact of a new specific regulation on the disclosure of environmental and employee matters in both consolidated-annual reports and social-environmental reports. It represents the first comprehensive attempt, as far as we are aware, at evaluating the impact of the 2.2.2007 Italian legislative decree n.32, following the 51/2003/CE directive, in both the consolidated-annual and social-environmental reports. All the Italian corporate groups which have drawn up stand-alone social-environmental reports both in 2005 and in 2010 have been selected: for each one of them also the consolidated-annual reports have been analyzed according to the dictate of the examined regulation. The results show the differences in corporate disclosure between the reports issued in 2005 (i.e. IAS first year of adoption and before the examined regulation) and those issued in 2010 (i.e. after the implementation of D.Lgs. 32/2007 which imposed to apply the Directive 51/2003/CE): there is a twofold increase, both in the number of groups which have a section dedicated to environmental and employee matters in the report on operations and in the value relevance assigned to non-financial indicators