New issue of the Corporate Ownership and Control journal

The recent issue (Volume 16, issue 2) of the journal “Corporate Ownership and Control” is devoted to the subjects related to the corporate governance such as accounting standards, efficacy of board governance, corporate social responsibility reporting, corporate governance disclosure, ownership and firms’ performance. The full issue of the journal is available following the link.

The topics addressed in this issue highlight the continuing need for knowledge present in academic and non-academic research. The themes analyzed have been already researched in previous studies and represent very interesting topics detected in the literature review of corporate governance. However, the papers published in this issue offer an additional point of view with regard to the most important corporate governance issues, further enriching knowledge and offering further discussion points for future researches on board structure, corporate governance in general and the relationship with many aspects of firms’ characteristics, both financial and operating features.

In particular, Pompili and Tutino aim to identify the specific impacts of unobservable inputs on earning quality. Theory and previous literature suggest a major negative impact of unobservable inputs than observable ones on the quality of information provided within financial reporting. Results show a negative and strong relationship between fair value accounting and earning quality for US banks that do not depend on the hierarchy of input used in the evaluation process.
On the other hand, Marsigalia and Giovannini analyze the public sector international accounting standards and they analyze the existing literature focuses on the New Zeland model which represents a pioneer model for accrual-based government accounting.
Law and Yuen evaluate AA’s financial performances by analyzing its financial reports throughout 2010 to 2012 using ratio analysis and they emphasize interesting strengths and weaknesses.
Napoli investigates the efficacy of board composition on a sample of Italian family firms and he finds that, unlikely agency theory, the presence of independent directors has no impact on firms’ performance.
Velte finds that the board composition, e.g. the gender diversity and the board independence, affects positively the CSR reporting.
Moreover, Alagla emphasizes that the board composition affects the corporate governance disclosure and in particular, gender diversity, board size, age of directors, the number of audit meetings contribute to increase the corporate governance disclosure.
With regard to the audit control, Regolisi and Martino detect the interaction between internal and external audit of public firms and find a substantial interaction between the two types of auditors. Marinello and Dinicolò offer a series of technical and conceptual tools to highlight the most critical aspects in order to guide decision-making process for the development of procedures, of human resources management and management controls, necessary to meet standards and to facilitate the development of a culture of quality, safety, and environment.
Shaban, Al-Hawatma and Abdallah focus on merger and acquisitions in Jordan and they find different results: a decreasing value in the first two years after acquisition, but a gradually increasing value in the subsequent years. With regard to specific sectors, Moro Visconti and Martiniello offer an overview on the smart hospitals and the new corporate governance structure in the healthcare sector, while Wang, Barrese and Pooser highlight that the composition of the ownership in the financial services sector is important as determinant of performance. The presence of large institutional investor in the financial services ownership affects positively financial performance. Finally, De Luca and Paolone underline that during the financial crisis, public firms have been more willing to manipulate their earnings and they believe that the reason may be to avoid giving bad news to markets, investors and lenders.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue of our journal!