A multi-stakeholder approach to voluntary disclosure of firms. An empirical research

Purpose – Firstly, the aim of our paper is to analyze the level of disclosure with reference to many corporate stakeholders of a representative sample of listed companies. In particular, we have verified the disclosure about the following: customers, suppliers, competitors, institutions, environment, community, human capital and corporate governance and financial lenders. For each stakeholder, we have selected a set of disclosure items from the following sources: - Global Reporting Iniziative (GRI) Guidelines; - European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies (EFFAS) ESG Guidelines; - CSR-SC Project Guidelines, arranged by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy during the Italian Presidency of the European Union. Secondly, we tried to highlight the trend over time of stakeholders’ related disclosure, also considering both the effects of the crisis and the introduction of the Legislative Decree n. 32/2007 which led to the amendment of Article 2428 of Italian Civil Code (which is the body of rules on the preparation of financial statements). Such provisions introduced for the first time in Italy, although in voluntary terms, further information than those financial in the managers’ report. Design/methodology/approach – As for the first contribute, unlike previous works put in the mainflow “voluntary disclosure literature”, our study does not dwell only on the analysis of mandatory annual documents but on all corporate documents: annual and consolidated financial statements, management, sustainability and corporate governance reports. For each stakeholder, we determined an index comparing the number of items disclosed by the company to the maximum number of items selected. As for the second contribute, we carried out this analysis with reference to the years 2006, 2009 and 2012 in order to describe the effects of the disclosure before and after the introduction of the above mentioned legislation. Originality/value – To our knowledge, this is the first study on voluntary disclosure that compute all the stakeholders, by following the “broad” approach of the Stakeholder Theory, as different dimensions of the corporate disclosure. It is also the first study in Italy that assigns an index to the disclosure released by company per each stakeholder, in order to make comparisons between different subject to which the disclosure is related. Practical implications – As we said previously, it is a first step for the comprehension of the behavior of listed companies in releasing information about all corporate stakeholders, in order to conclude whether and which of these stakeholders would seem to gain or to lose from the disclosure made by firms.