Board evaluation in Italian Listed Companies

Abstract

In the last decade performance evaluation of the Board of Directors hasbecome a best practice at national and international level. Italy is an interesting areaof analysis given the high concentration of ownership that characterizes companies,including listed companies. In this context the choices of governance that affect thelevel of disclosure, for which the expectation is to have a low level of disclosure onthe practice of BE (Board Evaluation).The first purpose of this paper is to present are´sume´ on the state of the art in terms of BE for Italian listed companies at 31stDecember 2012, in terms of presence/absence of the practice of disclosure and itsmore or less extensive disclosure. The second objective is to highlight the modalityof adoption of BE and the third is to analyze the relationship between the quality ofBE (measured using as a proxy the disclosure on its setting up) and corporategovernance. The results reveal there are few companies that use board evaluationand that there is a relationship between BE adoption and good governance andbetween the quality of BE and good governance.