Bank-Firm Relation Changes and Earnings Quality - An Analysis on Italian Small-Medium Sized Companies

Abstract

In the last years banks and firms relationship in Italy has experienced deep changes due to a new revised national and international regulation and to an increasing globalization of economic environment. These evolutions imply a new bank-firm relationship with a deeper disclosure, in a perspective of partnership between them. In this scenario, Basel 1 and 2 accords have been contributing to revise bank-firm relationship, moreover in the specific perspective of small-medium sized firms. In Italy, the evolution of bank-firm relation has been also influenced by an intensive banking system restructuring process, characterized by big mergers and small local banks aggregations. This paper focuses on bank-firm relation impact on small-medium sized firms financial reporting quality. The analysis empirically examines some proxies for earnings quality for a sample of Italian small-medium sized firms over 10 years period. Earnings quality metrics are based on the relation between working capital accruals and cash flows, following Dechow and Dichev (2002) approach. Across these metrics we will perform a cross-sectional analysis on the relation between earnings quality and some variables regarding banks and firms governance, controlling for regulation changes and other variables such as size, sector etc.