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Purpose – This study investigates the relationship between the ownership structure and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies of the Italian listed banks. In particular, it focuses on the impact that institutional investors characterized by a philanthropic orientation (banking foundations) exert on the socially oriented management of the Italian financial institutions.

Methodology – This chapter adopts a case study approach. It examines the CSR of the bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena and the role that its controlling shareholder (Fondazione MPS) plays in promoting the social strategy implemented by the Italian bank.

Findings – The Monte dei Paschi di Siena CSR strategy appears to be strongly influenced by the activity of its institutional investor. The skills, knowledge, and the cultural proneness toward social issues of the Fondazione MPS are successfully transferred to the bank and shape its social strategy.

Research limitations – This chapter suffers of the limitations generally associated to the case study research methodology. In particular, the findings of this study can be extended to other cases only after a detailed examination of market wide, institutional and corporate governance differences.

Social implications – The positive relationship between nonprofit institutional investors and the CSR strategy effectiveness unveils corporate governance mechanisms useful to increase the overall value creation process of the organizations.

Originality/value of the chapter – This study contributes to the CSR literature by analyzing if and how the philanthropic nature of the blockholders affect the CSR policies carried out by the entities they control.

Public-interest entities – among which are listed companies – are obliged to publish nonfinancial disclosure in some countries and regions. The European Commission established mandatory nonfinancial disclosure by Directive 2014/95/EU. While a large body of literature was developed on sustainability reporting quality (SRQ) in voluntary context, evidence about the effect of mandatory nonfinancial disclosure on SRQ is controversial and previous experiences worldwide did not make clear if obligatoriness improves SRQ. This chapter aims to bridge the gap of empirical evidence about this phenomenon in European countries, focusing on first implementation of new legislation by Italian and German companies. The research has an explorative character and it adopts content analysis methods performed on sustainability reporting practices of companies listed in FTSE-MIB and DAX 30. The analysis aims to understand if obligatoriness affects SRQ, causes some changes in reporting practices such as harmonizing Italian and German ones by performing a cross-country comparison. The findings suggest that obligatoriness improves reporting quality and, above all, it fills the gap between different countries by fostering the adoption of international guidelines and the consequent introduction of some content, such as materiality analysis and quantitative measures of social and environmental performance.

With the spread of the coronavirus disease across over 100 countries and its status upgraded to that of a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (World Health Organization), increased attention is being placed on the policy measures that may be required to effectively curb the rate of contagion within and across countries. Currently, several governments, such as China, Italy, Spain, Japan and the Republic of Korea, have implemented emergency measures informed by the principle of social distancing to limit the spread of coronavirus (World Health Organization). Ever since the virus was first identified in Wuhan City in December 2019, this succession of uncoordinated policy responses offers a set of natural experiments that should be analysed to understand the successes and failures of containment at the societal level. In this analysis, we focus on the case of Italy, the hardest hit country in Europe (Dong, Du, & Gardner, 2020; World Health Organization). The objective of this short note is to provide an even-handed analysis of the actions taken by the Italian government to cope with the transmission of the virus and to highlight lessons in emergency management that can be learnt for other countries currently facing the onset of the Covid-19 epidemic.