Dipartimento di Management

Abstract: The purpose is to verify whether the company’s size (in terms of production value) could be considered as a relevant factor in impacting company performance, taking into consideration the country variable. Italian and German companies have been compared. The country factor (considering its structural and economic characteristics that are different from the company’s size) has a primary importance in determining the differences of performance between German and Italian companies. There is a weak relationship between the companies’ performance and their size. Size factor is not one of the main factors that explain why the performance of the German companies is better than Italian ones. Global differences are mainly due to the structural and economic characteristics of each country and, in residual form, due to different size of the companies operating in those two countries. The research is characterised by several theoretical and practical implications, especially for top management and investors.

Islamic Finance have been a flourishing phenomenon recently with a very high growth rates and countries worldwide are exerting efforts to introduce it as an alternative financial system especially after proving its stability in the last financial crisis. Introducing the Islamic finance in Italy would be very important step with high potential opportunities due to the creation of investment opportunities, increase of liquidity, accessing Arab sovereign funds, and promoting integration policies for immigrants. Understanding the current nature of the Italian companies in particular the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and by testing their eligibility of being Sharia compliant in this paper; which is a fundamental step for exploring the feasibility of adapting them to the Islamic financial system and therefore the possibility for financing them through Islamic financial instruments; had proved its validity with an optimal results whether on the screening process or the performance and profitability measures.

Islamic banks are vastly growing in a way that makes it highly important to have a unified risk management disclosure standards. This paper aims to explore the various kinds of risk that faces the Islamic financial institutions and in particular Islamic banks. The research focuses on studying deeply the operational risk since it represents one of the risks that is highly elevated in Islamic banks in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Unlike market and credit risk, the operational risk is difficult to evaluate and faces many issues like lack of standardization, measurement, and disclosure as well as the difference among the various regulatory rules in which will be discussed. Our objective is to find the best disclosure practices in financial annual reports and to develop unified operational risk disclosure framework in Islamic banks, where the full annual reports published by banks form the basis of our research. A content analysis is used to compare the disclosure of the operational risk among the different Islamic banks in different countries focusing on the banks that are adopting International Financial Reporting Standards " IFRS " and examining the disclosure quality for the selected sample of banks. Moreover a comparison for the different measurement approaches for calculating capital adequacy that are the basic indicator approach, the standardized approach, and the advanced measurement approach and which one of them is mostly used. We expect

Islamic banks are vastly growing in a way that makes it highly important to have a unified risk management disclosure standards. This paper aims to explore the various kinds of risk that faces the Islamic financial institutions and in particular Islamic banks. The research focuses on studying deeply the operational risk since it represents one of the risks that is highly elevated in Islamic banks in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Unlike market and credit risk, the operational risk is difficult to evaluate and faces many issues like lack of standardization, measurement, and disclosure as well as the difference among the various regulatory rules in which will be discussed. Our objective is to find the best disclosure practices in financial annual reports and to develop unified operational risk disclosure framework in Islamic banks, where the full annual reports published by banks form the basis of our research. A content analysis is used to compare the disclosure of the operational risk among the different Islamic banks in different countries focusing on the banks that are adopting International Financial Reporting Standards " IFRS " and examining the disclosure quality for the selected sample of banks. Moreover a comparison for the different measurement approaches for calculating capital adequacy that are the basic indicator approach, the standardized approach, and the advanced measurement approach and which one of them is mostly used. We expect our paper to become a benchmark for Islamic banks for preparing their operational risk disclosure.

Large-scale and long-term infrastructure projects can struggle to find sufficient financing. Globally, there are expanding efforts to mobilize international financial resources. This paper argues that Sharia-compliant financing represents a potential opportunity as a financial resource for public utility projects. Sharia compliance requires consistency of all transactions with Islamic financial principles. This paper describes Sharia-compliant financing principles and criteria, reviews various financing instruments, and summarizes their use in a variety of utility infrastructure projects across the globe.