Ricerc@Sapienza

Through this paper, we empirically studied the presence, evolution,
and determinants of voluntary disclosure with reference to the Italian Stock
Exchange context in a multi-stakeholder approach. In particular, we identified
eight stakeholders: customers, suppliers, competitors, institutions, community,
environment, human capital and corporate governance, and financial lenders.
For each one, we verified its disclosure in the following years: 2006, 2009, and
2012. As far as the presence and evolution of disclosure, our results show that
there has been indeed an increase of disclosure, especially during the period
2009–2012. But it is still far from the level required by international
organisations (Guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative; Guidelines for
ESG approved by the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies;
Guidelines developed as part of the CSR-SC project, prepared by the Italian
Ministry of Labour and Social Policy). With reference to the determinants, we
applied a mixed logit model for generalised binomial random variables that
allowed us to see that the only variable that positively affects the disclosure of
each stakeholder is the firm size.