Examining the quality of the consolidated mandatory non‐financial statements of a cooperative banking group: A longitudinal analysis

Abstract With the 2014/95/EU Directive, implemented in Italy with the Legislative Decree no. 254/2016, public interest entities with specific requirements, among which credit institutions, have been obliged to report several aspects of non‐financial information (NFI) in a non‐financial statement (NFS). It remains an open question whether NFI disclosure regulations leads to an improvement in reporting quality. In this article, we investigate the quality of the consolidated mandatory NFSs (CNFSs) for the Iccrea Cooperative Banking Group (ICBG) for the 2017–2020 period. This article is the first study exploring the quality of mandatory NFDs using a longitudinal approach for a cooperative banking group, and it is also the first to use three different meanings of quality in the same study (quality as compliance to the Decree requirements, as multidimensional construct, and as completeness) under the theoretical lens of material legitimacy.