Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Review of literature
3. Data and methods
4. Results and discussion
5. Implications for bankruptcy prediction
6. Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Appendix A. Cluster sizes in 32 cluster solutions and classification of each cluster to a theoretical firm failure process
Appendix B. Shares of theoretically correct processes by clusters in 32 cluster solutions
Appendix C. Contingency between theoretical and empirical FFPs in the solution C8
References
Abstract
This paper aims to extract firm failure processes (FFPs) by using failure risk and rank the importance of failure risk contributors for different stages of FFPs. The dataset is composed of 1234 bankrupt firms from different European countries and three theoretically motivated FFPs are detected. For the dominant FFP found (73% of cases), failure risk becomes high very shortly before bankruptcy is declared. Annual and accumulated profitability are the most important failure risk contributors for these stages of all FFPs, where failure probability exceeds 50%. The obtained results provide important implications for bankruptcy prediction research and practice, especially in terms of identifying the most important financial predictors.
Introduction
Firm failure is an eternal topic in business research. The development of subdomains in this literature stream has remained unbalanced, the failure prediction domain being represented with a myriad of studies (Mellahi & Wilkinson, 2004; Ravi Kumar & Ravi, 2007; Sun, Li, Huang, & He, 2014), but in turn the processual context being in a serious minority (Amankwah-Amoah, 2016; Lukason, Laitinen, & Suvas, 2016). The processual context is more broadly linked to the stage theory of business failure, which originates from the idea that before failure, firms go through numerous observable stages (AmankwahAmoah, 2016; Weitzel & Jonsson, 1989). Of these stages, the recent focus has mainly been set on firm turnaround (James, 2016; Mann & Byun, 2017; Trahms, Ndofor, & Sirmon, 2013; Zorn, Norman, Butler, & Bhussar, 2017). On the other hand, studies focusing on the stages of processes ending with bankruptcy are infrequent and AmankwahAmoah (2016: 3392) has noted that “there remains a lack of consensus on the exact processes of decline leading to exit”.