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 inter-coder 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.