Intellectual Capital Disclosure: Evidence from the Italian Systemically Important Banks

The need to overcome the limitations connected with the
traditional financial reporting has driven the development of intellectual
capital (IC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure.
Such need has also highlighted the relevance of an integrated reporting,
recently supported by the Directive 2014/95/EU, which makes mandatory
the disclosure of non-financial information for large-sized enterprises.
The chapter focusses on the disclosure of the IC issues provided
by the Italian systemically important banks. To conduct our analysis, we
defined a disclosure model for the IC issues and collected data from the reports available on the banks’ websites; we used a deductive content
analysis, integrated by the Scott’s pi test in order to evaluate the intercoder
reliability. Our findings, accordingly to prior literature, point out an
incomplete IC disclosure, meaning that banks should extend the level of
reporting on IC issues, and particularly they should improve the presence
of forward-looking information and the quantified terms of IC elements.