Non-financial Information About Intangibles and CSR in the Context of Mandated Non-financial Disclosure: A Configurational Approach for Italian Listed Companies

As a result of the EU regulatory body’s recent choices to mandate companies’ non-financial information (NFI) with the 2014/95/EU Directive, this study investigates the extent to which NFI about Intangibles, Intellectual Capital, and CSR affect market performance. Specifically, we address the question of whether different NFI configurations/combinations lead to successful performance. We considered various NFI factors/characteristics that may affect the performance level (the number of pages of non-financial statements, presentation of the statement separately from or aggregated with the annual report, the same or different auditor for the statement and annual report, and the number of times keywords are found in reports). The analysis was tested on a sample of 81 non-financial reports of Italian listed companies for 2017, which is the first year of adoption of Directive 95/2014/EU in Italy under the Decree 254/2016. The study uses Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FsQCA) to obtain a holistic view of the examined interrelationships, as opposed to traditional net effect approaches that assume symmetrical and linear relationships among variables. Our findings provide new insights into the possible association between NFI and companies’ performance. Thus, we provide evidence that a higher level of financial performance originates from several possible combinations/configurations of NFI and this appears to be in line with the emergent scholar debate on intellectual capital and CSR reporting and disclosure.