Search results

This paper aims to examine the market risk disclosure practices of large Italian banks. The contribution provides insights on the way banks should provide information about market risk. The problem related to the asymmetric information between banks from one side, and investors and stakeholders on the other, represents a crucial issue that requires further considerations by scholars and regulators.

This contribution adopts a mixed methodological approach to analyse both qualitative and quantitative profiles of market risk disclosure in banking. This paper analyses the most important documents Italian banks are required to prepare for risk disclosure purposes, namely the management commentary, the Basel Pillar 3 disclosure report and the notes.

The results show that banks do not fully exploit the potentialities of management commentary and Pillar 3 disclosure report. Various areas of information overlapping between the different financial reports worsen the overall comprehensibility and relevance of bank risk reporting.

The reduction of the information overlapping, the careful choice of the location of the information and more appropriate use of the management commentary to provide qualitative information about market risk strategies represent crucial areas of improvement banks and regulators should take into account.

Providing an in-depth analysis of the market risk disclosure practices of a sample of large Italian banks, this paper detects the main drawbacks of their market risk reporting and provides useful recommendations to improve it.

This paper aims to analyse the implementation challenges faced by internal audit departments of public sector organisations and central banks when implementing continuous auditing (CA) systems. CA aims to monitor internal control systems and risk levels on a continuous basis to support the audit process. This study identifies the implementation challenges of CA systems and proposes adequate countermeasures.

This study employs the design science information system research and the design science research process methodologies to ensure the rigor of this analysis. These research methodologies are adopted to tackle identified organisational problems and propose solutions. This methodological approach consists in the following phases: identification of the problems and motivation; definition of the objectives of the solution; research design and development; evaluation; communication.

This study detects several implementation challenges for public sector organisations and central banks and proposes adequate solutions. This study finds that these challenges are related to organisations’ complexity, institutional rigidity, potential threats to internal auditors’ independence and the issue of considering CA system as a “real time error correction” mechanism. The solutions involve the development of a business process focussed audit approach to enable internal auditors to analyse CA indicators, and the use of CA systems to support each phase of the audit process.

This study contributes to the scant strand of literature on internal auditing in central banks. Given the exceptional demand for guidance concerning internal auditing in the public sector and in central banks, this paper provides guidelines for these organisations to implement CA systems and to tackle implementation challenges. The analysis allows internal audit departments within central banks to better support their organisations in the achievement of their important regulatory and policy objectives.

This paper aims to assess the impact of regulatory changes on corporate environmental disclosure practices in Europe. More specifically, the authors perform a difference-in-differences analysis to study the impact of the Paris agreement (United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21) and of the French Law 2015-992 on energy transition for green growth.

The sample consists of the listed companies belonging to the Euro Stoxx 50 index, and they are analysed over the 2010–2019 time horizon by means of an expert validated environmental disclosure dictionary and difference-in-differences analysis.

The main results show that both regulatory interventions contributed to improving corporate environmental disclosure. The authors also show that firms belonging to the most polluting sectors tend to provide more information on environmental matters, likely in an attempt to divert stakeholders’ attention.

By analysing an under-investigated topic, the paper calls for significant efforts by regulators to find the most suitable solutions to induce firms to increase their levels of transparency on the impact of environmental risks and on how these risks are managed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the vertical disintegration of the bank loan origination value chain. This paper conducts a study on the credit information market from the perspective of the bank’s decision to vertically disintegrate the loan origination value chain. The main aim is to identify the relevant drivers of the decision to vertically disintegrate the credit assessment phase in the lending business.

Transaction cost economics and information asymmetry are the typical perspectives of analysis of the vertical scope of business value chains.

This paper argues that in order to capture the drivers underlying the dynamic evolution of the vertical scope of bank loan origination business models, the above perspectives must be combined and integrated further with a resource-based view and the modularity perspective. Combining managerial and financial perspectives, this paper offers an examination of the drivers of vertical disintegration in the lending value chain and, specifically, in the credit assessment phase.

Although the existence of substantial research on value chain vertical integration/disintegration in the literature, none has directly focussed on the credit assessment value chain. It leaves a gap that the paper aims to overcome. The value chain disintegration has deep managerial and financial implications at firm and industry levels, and the comprehension of the rational underlying it is critical to maintaining competitive business model configurations in the bank lending industry.