A cross-cultural perspective of voluntary disclosure: Italian listed firms in the stakeholder global context

Through this paper, we empirically studied the presence, evolution, and determinants of voluntary disclosure with reference to the Italian Stock Exchange context in a multi-stakeholder approach. In particular, we identified eight stakeholders: customers, suppliers, competitors, institutions, community, environment, human capital and corporate governance, and financial lenders. For each one, we verified its disclosure in the following years: 2006, 2009, and 2012. As far as the presence and evolution of disclosure, our results show that there has been indeed an increase of disclosure, especially during the period 2009–2012. But it is still far from the level required by international organisations (Guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative; Guidelines for ESG approved by the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies; Guidelines developed as part of the CSR-SC project, prepared by the Italian Ministry of Labour and Social Policy). With reference to the determinants, we applied a mixed logit model for generalised binomial random variables that allowed us to see that the only variable that positively affects the disclosure of each stakeholder is the firm size.