Purpose – The purpose of our study is to investigate how an environmental management system (EMS) might affect the environmental product innovation propensity of a firm through its influence on two factors shaping the knowledge process: the human capital management practices of training and development and the organisational context. Design/methodology/approach – To test our hypotheses, an empirical analysis was carried out on 262 companies drawn from 16 developed European markets included in the S&P Europe 350 Dow Jones index over the years 2005–2015. We adopted regression analysis by employing the ordinary least squares and the binary logit econometric models. Findings – Consistently with our predictions, results show that for organisational contexts characterized by the presence of family owners, the EMAS-certified EMS reveals as a significant moderating factor that positively influences their approach to the knowledge management tools for the improvement of the workforce cognitive capabilities, with a significant impact on the firm's openness toward green product innovation. On the contrary, the ISO 14001-certified EMS tends not to stimulate such pro-active behaviour, in both family and non-family firms. Practical Implications – The findings suggest that an EMS can stimulate the knowledge exploration in the environmental protection field. To this end, top managers should overcome the bureaucratic vision of an EMS and conceive it as a knowledge management tool able to support the learning evolution of the organization through an effective commitment to human capital management policies of training and development. Originality/value – Drawing from social identity and institutional theories, this is the first study - to the best of our knowledge - that theorises and tests why the adoption of an EMS might stimulate the knowledge advancement of the organisation in a different way, especially in peculiar organisational contexts of family firms where the identity overlap between the family and the firm tends to affect the knowledge management process.

This paper aims to investigate whether intangible assets, especially goodwill, are value relevant to investors in Italy. In particular, we explore whether the switch from Italian GAAP to IAS-IFRS standards in 2005 affected the value relevance of goodwill and other recognized identifiable intangible assets, after controlling for the book value of equity and earnings effects. The hypotheses aretested by checking for both the statistical significance and the explanatory power of selected variables in a multivariate regression model.We find that goodwill and the identifiable intangible assets are not value relevant under Italian GAAP. Nevertheless, goodwill becomes so following the adoption of IAS-IFRS, but negatively affecting firms’ market value. These results suggest that the impairment approach tends to significantly worsening the investors’ confidence in the reliability of the recognized goodwill amounts. We then split the period 2005–2010 into further sub-periods in order to also take the effects of the financial crisis into account. During the financial crisis, the recognized goodwill continues to generate a negative effect on the market value of the Italian listed companies.Nevertheless, during financial crisis the other intangible assets become value relevant with a positive effect on share price. These findings seem to suggest that the financial crisis has further reduced the trust of investors in the goodwill amounts reported in balance sheets whereas investors’ confidence reveals with reference to the identifiable intangibles.