This paper investigates the influence of internal managerial patterns of Heath Care Authorities on the decision of users/patients to migrate towards different Health Care organizations to avail treatments. The efficiency and productivity issues are analyzed, considering the passive migration as a proxy for the inefficient service availed. Besides, the structure of operating costs for Health Care Authorities is investigated in order to assess the eventual relationship between managerial spending choices and success of medical centers compelling citizens’ needs. A strong correlation is found among variables in our model and some relevant dependence is tested between patients’ mobility behavior and their resident authorities’ efficiency in spending

This empirical study investigates whether borrowers manage earnings to ameliorate their accounting portrait and to achieve a better borrowing capacity in the private loan market. We analyse the impact of borrowers’ earnings management activity on the amount and costs of their private loans both at the time of lending (ex post earnings management) and before a lending agreement is made (ex ante earnings management). We test our hypothesis on a panel sample of 465 small and medium-sized private corporations from the debt-dependent southern EU economies of Italy, Portugal and Spain over the 2002–2012 period. Using a generalized method of moments (GMM) model to control for endogeneity, we find that the discretionary earnings management activity of borrowers favours larger loan amounts, both ex post and ex ante. By contrast, we find no impact of borrowers’ earnings management activity on the costs of loans. Interestingly, we find that the relationship between earnings management and firms’ borrowing capacity is not significant before the enactment of the Basel II regulation; however, in the period following its enactment, we find a positive and systematic impact of earnings management (both ex post and ex ante) on the amount of bank loans, as well as some positive impact on the costs of bank loans. Our results indicate that borrowers manage earnings to signal better quality to lenders and to ameliorate their borrowing capacities, regardless of the excessive costs of doing so. In addition, we find that the introduction of the Basel II rules likely strengthened this tendency. The findings of this research should alert bank regulators to the feasibility of an unintended economic consequence of rigid discipline with respect to bank risk taking—namely, reducing borrowers’ transparency may lead to less prudent assessments of borrowers’ creditworthiness.

The book studies the role of accounting and accountants during the crisis, with a specific focus on how management accounting may help to deal with organizational uncertainty. After a brief introduction, the book is made up of four main parts: Chapter 1 describes the role that management accounting can assume in dealing with uncertainty, and how such a role has gained respect over recent decades due to an extremely dynamic business environment. Chapter 2 studies the issues management process and proposes a specific model to be adopted by organizations in order to avoid or mitigate financial distress, and eventually cope with a serious crisis threatening default. Such a model supports the need for continuous monitoring and planning activity by the management accounting function. Chapter 3 focuses on the function covered by management accountants (i.e., internal auditors) and the instruments adopted in their strategic and operative control activity to deal with uncontrollable situational factors, i.e., uncertainty. Chapter 4 offers a digression on enterprise risk management and its criticalities in times of crisis. Finally, brief comments conclude the book.

This paper investigates the influence of internal managerial patterns of heath care authorities on the decision of patients to migrate towards different health care organizations to avail treatments. The efficiency and productivity issues are analyzed, considering the (passive) migration as a proxy for the (in)efficient service availed. We follow the “vote by feet” theorization by Tiebout [33], assuming that citizens can choose to avail a health treatment in a public service provider different from their resident one. The choice for a center that is far from home implies a negative judgment to the alternative health care supplier that is closer to the patient. Testing Fixed Effects Panel Model on a sample of Italian health care authorities, a strong correlation is found among variables in our model and some relevant dependence is tested between patients’ mobility behavior and their resident authorities’ efficiency in allocating resources on the proper operating cost. Spending in the proper way on health care could bring about an enhancement of performances. Instead, wasting resources is immediately perceived by the patient, who consequently seems to move to a different health care authority.

Analisi critica dei lavori condotti in materia di IPO nella letteratura nazionale ed internazionale.

This paper studies whether and why government-owned firms avoid taxation to a greater extent than private owners do. By considering a sample of Italian listed corporations between 2006 and 2011, it was found that government ownership had a systematically negative effect on corporate income’s effective tax rate, with a prevalence of tax-planning policies being focused on a long-term horizon. Managers of local government-owned firms pursue the goals of focusing on cost-minimizing policies, even to the detriment of national tax-revenue collection.

Markets can get the confidence of investors enhancing the quality of governance and audit systems surrounding a firm. Financial reporting is a main component of them, being the basis for information necessary to investors’ decisions. Managers have a chance to manipulate information provided in financial statements, in order to offer a better image of a firm to its potential and effective investors. The objective of this study is to evaluate the possibility of detecting extreme cases of earnings management and to check the predictive ability of the discretionary accruals models on the event of fraudulent earnings restatement. Through the abuse of reporting incentives, a manager gives out false information that should be averted and punished by regulators in a fair market system. The authors check the efficacy of different earnings management detection models in predicting discretionary manipulations and study the correlation between the frequency of manipulation and the event of fraud.

The manipulation of income taxes is a young but growing field of interest for accounting scholars, in a great fashion in the last few years. This research provides a theoretical and an empirical investigation of corporate tax aggressiveness in the European Union, and underlines the relevance of the different national and cross-national institutional contexts in the decision of manipulating earnings in the lines of taxation. We study tax aggressiveness, but not tax evasion, hence, we basically focus on non-conforming but legal ways of planning tax expenses (Slemrod and Yitzhaki, 2002). In the investigation, we adopt the theories and methods of comparative institutional analysis (Morgan et al., 2010), focusing on coherence and diversity among the various national and cross-national environments where the firms live.

This chapter provides an analysis of the concept of local government services from an international perspective, examining what can be considered local government services and how various local government services might be categorized. Under the framework of contingency theory, this chapter reviews the complex issue of defining and classifying a wide range of public services provided at local level. It focuses mainly on i) the subject-community beneficiary ofthe service provision; ii) the subject-government responsible for the service provision, distinguishing the government tiers involved in service supply and the recourse to contracting out to fulfil public duties; and iii) the objective definition of the services, aiming to provide a list of functions that are considered service tasks for local governments. This chapter contributes to the conceptual analysis of public services, demonstrating similarities and differences in the cross-national development of contingent local government public services.