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Abstract. From reporting periods ending on or after 31 December 2014, Italian unlisted companies filing their financial statements under the national GAAP have to deposit them to the Business Register in fully XBRL format. In particular, for companies submitting their financial statements in the abbreviated form, the mandatory taxonomy has offered the option to use in their notes also the tables of the standard one: this means that they can voluntarily provide more information than that normally required by the law. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon focusing on its level and analyzing the variables explaining the reasons that push Italian SMEs to use, in their abbreviated financial statements, non-compulsory tables that are proper of the standard ones. Based on a large sample of 8,738 elements, we report surprising results: more than 80% of the abbreviated financial statements include at least one table proper of the standard ones, while on average they include seven. In addition, when analyzing the determinants of this phenomenon we find that the only relevant variable explaining the number of optional tables included in the abbreviated financial statements is the software used for preparing them.

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Our study examines corporate governance practices in Europe according to the best practice guidelines of 17 countries. We particularly focus on the independence criteria of Board members. Doing so, we wish to understand how these best practices are enforced in the actual corporate governance guidelines in each country. To better define the independence criteria, which is very different among European countries, we develop our own measure of independence, taking into account the strictest criteria of independence recommended in the corporate governance codes of the studied countries. Then, we gather firm-level statistics on a sample of 463 European firms to understand whether the best practice guidelines are actually enforced by these firms. Hence, we contribute to the existent literature by presenting descriptive statistics on the compliance of European firms to their national guidelines. Our findings show that most European firms tend to comply with their local best practice guidelines of corporate governance. We also document a high compliance of our European sample-firm with the Anglo - Saxon best practices of corporate governance.

The new taxonomy 2014-11-17 mandates Italian unlisted companies to codify in XBRL also the notes to the financial statements. Building on previous literature, the aim of this study is to analyze the impact of mandatory XBRL extension to the financial statements notes on financial reporting quality of the Italian unlisted companies. We focus our analysis on the taxonomy usage and the customizations made by the filers. Our data represents the very first sample of Italian financial statements filed in fully XBRL format. Despite the significant changes affecting the process of financial statement preparation, we find that Italian unlisted companies have accepted and acknowledged the potential benefits and limits of the new taxonomy. When dividing the notes section between textual blocks and tables, we find a clear preference for the filers to use textual blocks for both, standard and abbreviated financial statements. Overall, we find that filers of both financial statement types use extensively the customizations offered by the taxonomy. Moreover, for the filers of abbreviated financial statements, we show that they tend to use not only more table customizations but also tables that are proper for the standard financial statements, thus offering higher voluntary disclosure.