Elisabetta Mafrolla

Purpose: This article investigates the evolving sustainability reporting landscape in the European Union (EU) following the implementation of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). It explores the degree of interoperability – that is, the effective alignment between the ESRS and major international frameworks, including the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the International Sustainability Reporting Standards (IFRS) – and evaluates how companies respond in practice. Design/methodology/approach: The study conducts a comparative analysis of energy companies operating within the EU. The empirical analysis is supported by the construction of an interoperability grid and the subsequent measurement of interoperability indicators. Findings: The analysis reveals strong alignment in disclosures between companies reporting under the ESRS and those reporting under the GRI, supporting the practical effectiveness of interoperability initiatives. In contrast, IFRS-aligned firms exhibit significantly lower and more heterogeneous disclosure levels, particularly in governance, highlighting limitations of investor-centric reporting frameworks in achieving comprehensive sustainability transparency. Research limitations/implications: The findings are based on a cross-sectional sample from a single EU sector, limiting their generalisability. Nevertheless, the results inform policymakers and firms by evidencing practical interoperability between the ESRS and GRI while highlighting gaps in IFRS-aligned disclosures. Practical implications: By empirically examining interoperability in practice, this study provides evidence-based insights for policymakers, standard setters, and firms, supporting alignment strategies and informing the implementation of sustainability reporting frameworks within the evolving EU regulatory landscape. Social implications: Achieving a truly harmonised reporting environment across the EU would strengthen stakeholder trust, enhance the comparability of disclosures, and support effective and sustainable economic development. Originality/value: This study provides empirical evidence on interoperability across the ESRS, GRI, and IFRS frameworks, offering one of the first disclosure-based assessments of cross-framework alignment in the early implementation phase of the CSRD.

Corporate investments in cryptoassets may offer substantial financial gains, but also create greater uncertainty. This paper examines whether and how crypto holdings affect the probability of disclosing unrecognised tax losses. Using regression analysis based on binary response models, we analyse 193 Canadian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firms reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards from 2020 to 2024. The findings show a positive impact of crypto holding on the likelihood of disclosing of unrecognised tax losses, whereas no significant impact is observed for crypto classified as non-current assets. These findings suggest that the tax-reporting implications of crypto investment depend not simply on firms’ participation in crypto markets, but on the magnitude and accounting classification of their crypto exposure. The study identifies corporate crypto exposure as a previously underexplored source of tax-reporting uncertainty, and extends crypto-accounting research by demonstrating that accounting classification has consequences beyond recognition and measurement, affecting deferred-tax disclosure. Finally, the empirical findings bridge crypto-accounting and deferred-tax literatures by showing that this association is concentrated in short-term crypto holdings classified as current assets revealing a tension between the potential financial benefits of crypto investment and its less visible tax-reporting drawbacks, highlighting the need for clearer accounting and tax guidance.

This paper offers an in-depth literature review of the role of digital technology in the tax ecosystem, investigating its reciprocal relationships with corporate tax avoidance. We combine an integrative literature review (ILR) with the ecosystem approach to analyse 38 recent papers addressing the effects of digital technology on: (i) corporate tax avoidance; (ii) tax authorities in counteracting corporate tax avoidance; and (iii) the reverse outcome, where digital technology growth is driven by tax avoidance. The review shows that digital technology affects corporate taxpayers and tax collectors differently and reveals interdependence among contexts (accounting, law, and economics) in explaining these outcomes. Digital technology creates both challenges and opportunities for tax accounting and regulation, influencing transparency and the likely effectiveness of tax law provisions. The literature also documents reverse causality, whereby tax policies can induce growth in the adoption of digital technology. Permanent establishment, Digital Services Tax, Common Reporting Standard, eXtensible Business Reporting Language, blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, e-commerce, digital finance, and digital transformation are particularly key technologies addressing corporate tax avoidance. This review contributes to tax research by integrating literature that provides evidence across tax accounting, tax law, and tax policy and economics. It also clarifies research gaps, highlighting a new stream of studies on ‘digital tax research’ and offering a comprehensive understanding of the role of digital technology in the tax ecosystem.

This article studies the underinvestigated but fascinating issue of the sociological determinants of accounting misbehavior while focusing on an allegedly illicit accounting practice (i.e., restatement) in family- vs. nonfamily-controlled corporations. Under the framework of institutional anomie theory, we examined whether sociological structures (i.e., legal forces and cultural values) influence accounting errors inducing restatements. By applying a multivariate regression analysis to a sample of restating firms listed in 23 countries during the 2006 to 2014 period, we found that legal forces and cultural values significantly moderate the severity of accounting errors. The results of this study suggest that investors, managers, and policymakers should more fully consider the sociological structures of societies when debating the feasibility of corporate misbehaviors, as combining firm-level and country-level analyses could help to predict a firm’s accounting misbehaviors, such as more severe accounting errors.

Although regulations designed to meet the necessities of tourists with disabilities are allowing disables to travel more, they are still encountering barriers and discriminatory practices. A relevant obstacle in making the tourist policy effective is represented by the lack of information and communication about needs and expectations of disabled categories. In this context, the present paper focuses on the coproduction process of tourist public policies for disables by looking at the network that facilitates communication among the actors taking part in the process. We adopt the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to study the policy network, i.e., how public administrations and policy users (associations of citizens/people with disabilities and entrepreneurs) exchange information about the accessibility to the Gargano National Park, a protected natural area in the South of Italy. In particular, we investigate the role of entrepreneurial stakeholders in channeling information and the presence of policy brokers, i.e., stakeholders that spread the policies to the whole network. Our findings show that a limited number of actors involved in granting accessibility to tourists with disabilities is engaged in information exchanges. Moreover, information flows are guided by only one public administration that plays, therefore, a key role in the implementation of policies that support the parks’ accessibility.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine whether firms in polluting industries improve their environmental performance to effectively repair their financial reputation in the aftermath of an accounting restatement – a financial reputation-damaging event.Design/methodology/approach: The authors test their hypotheses using multiple regression analysis of a sample of firms listed in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)-adopting countries. They use a comparative empirical design in which a sample of firms that underwent a restatement (henceforth, restating firms) are compared with control groups of pair- and multiple-matched firms that did not undergo restatements (non-restating firms).Findings: The study finds that restating firms have higher environmental performance in the aftermath of restatement events. Additionally, the authors demonstrate that this environmentally based reputation repair positively influences the financial reputation of the firms, as measured by analyst coverage and recommendations and which previously decreased because of the restatement event.Practical implications: Because environmental levers are a substantial contextual factor in polluting industries, shifting the stakeholder debate to firms’ environmental commitment can improve financial stakeholders’ opinions and favour the repair of the multifaceted reputation of the financially damaged firm.Social implications: With a worldwide growing attention to environment there is a critical need for understanding how polluting firms integrate sustainability and financial reputation. We demostrate that polluting firms recover from a financial failure pursuing their environmental performance.Originality/value: Contributing to the behavioural theory of reputation repair and in line with the legitimacy perspective in environmental disclosure research, this paper shows that polluting firms recover from a loss to their financial reputation by diverting stakeholders’ attention towards the environmental field, thus restoring their financial reputation, as financial analysts value environmental performance improvement – a substantial contextual factor of polluting firms’ reputation repair process.

Purpose: In an increasingly turbulent and competitive environment, open innovation could be critical for a firm’s success, favoring organizational flexibility and accelerating innovation processes. However, sharing innovation projects with external partners often requires changes in traditional organizational behavior and visions of CEOs. The purpose of this paper is to theorize and empirically verify how the CEO turnover and some socially relevant characteristics of the old and the new CEO may impact firms’ propensity toward open innovation under an integrated agency-resource dependence view and social identity perspective.Design/methodology/approach: The empirical analysis was carried out on 264 companies drawn from 16 developed European markets included in the S&P Europe 350 Dow Jones index over the years 2006-2015. To test the predictions, the authors adopted regression analysis by employing the panel two-stages least squares model and the ordinary least squares econometric model.Findings: Consistently with the predictions, the authors found that CEO turnover stimulates open innovation. Particularly, the results suggest that the organizational identity rationale may motivate a divergent propensity between insider and outsider new CEOs, with outsiders more prone to open innovation. The higher tendency of new outsider CEOs to undertake innovation projects jointly with external organizations prevails also within firms that experienced a long tenure of the former CEO, thereby suggesting that a new outsider CEO appears able to renovate corporate strategic directions also in highly orthodox organizational cultures.Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that theorizes why CEO turnover might impact the propensity of the firm toward open innovation. The authors use an integrated agency-resource dependence perspective, and the results from the empirical analysis mostly support the predictions. Moreover, the authors adopt the social identity theory to show that the organizational identification of the CEO matters in the decision of engaging in open innovation.

This paper offers new evidence regarding the impact of public spending on the supply of leisure services on citizens’ spare-time quality of life. Using data from 103 Italian capital municipalities covering the period 2007–2010, the analysis revealed that public spending on leisure impacted spare-time quality of life in various ways, depending on the category of spending. Spending for tourism essentially followed an upward path, linearly enhancing citizens’ spare-time quality of life. Surprisingly, municipalities’ spending on sport- and culture-related services had a non-linear impact. Hence, spending on sports within a maximum threshold reveals a positive impact on spare-time quality of life, whereas passing over a minimum level of public spending for culture-related projects had a positive effect. This paper provides helpful suggestions for policymakers who approach decisions that address whether it is worth spending on leisure, which is typically a non-basic need but one that must be properly satisfied by municipalities in today’s service-based society.