In June 2023, the University of Siena and the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) organized the ninth Workshop on Accounting and Regulation. The Workshop is a well-established forum and provides the opportunity for scholars from all regions of the world to present and discuss research papers on financial and non-financial topics at the intersection between accounting and regulation.
The first workshop was held in Siena at the Certosa di Pontignano in 1999. This year we celebrated the 25th year of this initiative. Over the series of nine Workshops, the number of scholars attending and joining us in Siena has increased considerably. At the most recent Workshop, held this time in the Rectorate of the University of Siena, we were able to welcome 109 participants from 20 different countries.
Roberto Di Pietra, Stuart McLeay, Joshua Ronen and Angelo Riccaboni initiated the EIASM Workshop series on Accounting and Regulation in Siena in 1998. They are pictured here at the Ninth Workshop in June 2023.
In total 71 papers were selected, and between them they provided a rich and stimulating program. The papers were presented and discussed in 22 parallel sessions, amongst which three specific sessions focused on “Governance and Accounting” as part of a Special Issue planned in collaboration with the Journal of Management and Governance (JMG).
There has been much attention recently to new regulatory developments in Sustainability Reporting. This has shifted the debate on Accounting and Regulation towards two aspects of reporting activity: the financial and the non-financial, which together comprise the full set of activities through which reporting entities generate and communicate their activities. Both dimensions are now subject to regulation, potentially through different institutions, and there is a need for a greater understanding of the way in which these reporting domains might be connected and possibly integrated.
Due to this emerging situation, we decided to open the Workshop with a plenary session in which the key-note speakers (Charl De Villiers, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Holger Daske, University of Mannheim, Germany) addressed non-financial and financial reporting issues respectively. This was followed up on the next day by two panel sessions in which regulator and preparer presentations were discussed by leading researchers, giving a regulator perspective on “Connectivity between Sustainability Reporting and Financial Reporting” and a preparer perspective on “Non-Financial Reporting: An Ongoing Challenge to Preparers and Regulators”.