"Proprieta" e "controllo" nelle scelte di consolidamento. Evidenze empiriche in Italia e negli Stati Uniti

The consolidation area could be affected by aggressive accounting choices aimed to represent a preordered group performance. The International and American standard setters accept different concept about the consolidation area that come down from different accounting culture and, in particular, from the group theories, that inspire the way in which the group has to be represented in the consolidated statement. Basically the consolidation area could be delimited with respect of the “ownership” criteria – which says that all the subsidiaries where the parent company own the majority of the voting right have to be included in the consolidation area – or with respect to the “control” criteria – which says that the subsidiaries that have to be included in the consolidation area are those linked to the parent by substantial relationship of dominance, that could be achieved in multiple ways (contractual relations, corporate agreements, business relations). The IASB follows the control criteria, while the FASB has been adopting the ownership criteria until some years ago, but it has recently uniformed to the IASB approach. The research pursues the following goals: 1. to analyze the evolution of the control notion in the IAS/IFRS and in the US GAAP; 2. to verify the impact of the accounting standards on the ownership choices, in particular: a. to test whether the companies are influenced by the changes occurred in the accounting standard about the consolidation area; b. to discover the extent of opportunistic behavior that inspire the ownership choices. To pursue the goals an empirical research has been carried on through a statistic descriptive and inferential analysis on the ownership choices of the parent companies. These choices are measured by the ownership percentage that each parent company of the sample own in the voting rights of the subsidiaries. The analysis has been carried on two samples of listed companies: a sample of Italian listed companies and a sample of US listed companies, in the period from the 2004 to the 2008, when the main changes on the accounting principle have occurred. The empirical evidence confirms the extent of aggressive accounting realized through the ownership percentage. This signals that companies are more willing to follow the “ownership” criteria, although the accounting standards prescribe the “control” criteria. The research provides insights about the role that companies ascribe to the “ownership” criteria, in the scientific debate concerning the preference to “bright line” standards, as the “ownership” criteria is, rather than “principle based”, that leave space to subjective and discretional choices, as it occurs applying the “control” approach.