Ettevõtete ebaõnnestumise protsesse iseloomustavad tunnused rahvusvahelises kontekstis

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsioone.Ettevõtete ebaõnnestumise protsesse on uuritud kaua aega, muuhulgas seoses teema püsiva praktilise aktuaalsusega. Dissertatsiooni eesmärgiks on luua finants- ja mittefinantsnäitajaid kasutades uut teadmust ettevõtete ebaõnnestumise protsesside kohta. Ebaõnnestumise protsessina käsitletakse dissertatsioonis pankrotini viivat teekonda, mille puhul vaadeldakse nii küsimusi „miks“ (ebaõnnestumise põhjused) kui ka „kuidas“ (finantsnäitajate muutumine ebaõnnestumise protsessis). Teekonna all on töös mõeldud kas ettevõtte kogu eluiga või teatud aastaid enne pankroti väljakuulutamist. Töö põhineb neljal avaldatud teadusartiklil, mis tuginevad erinevate Euroopa riikide andmetele. Töö näitab, et väga noori ettevõtteid iseloomustavad kolme tüüpi ebaõnnestumise protsessid: akuutne, järk-järguline, krooniline. Vanematele ettevõtetele on omased ainult järk-järgulise ebaõnnestumise protsessid, milledele on iseloomulik lühi- ja pikaajalise maksevõime, rentaabluse ning efektiivsuse suhtarvude väärtuste halvenemine kuni pankroti väljakuulutamiseni. Erineva päritoluriigi ning erineva suurusega ettevõtteid iseloomustavad väga erinevad ebaõnnestumise protsessid. Ka ebaõnnestumise põhjused on riikide lõikes erinevad. Eesti ettevõtete ebaõnnestumist selgitab enim integreeritud teooria, st. ebaõnnestumine sise- ja väliskeskkonna põhjuste koosmõjus, kuid see ei kehti igas suuruses ja vanuses ettevõtete kohta. Näiteks ebaõnnestuvad vanad ettevõtted enim ainult väliskeskkonnast ning suured ettevõtted mõlema keskkonna koosmõjust tulenevate põhjuste tõttu. Töö tulemused annavad mõningaid praktilisi näpunäiteid, millised muutujad eri tüüpi ettevõtete korral võivad peatset pankrotistumist indikeerida.Firm failure processes is a major field of research with important implications for practice, as firm failures occur daily. This thesis aims to improve the understanding of firm failure processes using financial and non-financial variables. The firm failure process is considered a pathway in a firm’s life cycle depicting why (causes of failure) and how (sequence of events) firms become bankrupt. The thesis is based on four original published articles, which include data mainly from different European countries. The thesis shows that young firms follow different financial failure processes (i.e. acute, gradual and chronic), but adolescent and old firms are characterized only by gradual failure processes, which indicate a step-by-step worsening of profitability, efficiency, liquidity and solidity during the pre-failure years. Firms in different European countries can follow various financial failure processes and these processes can also vary with firm size and export behaviour. Firms in different countries can be subject to different failure causes. While firms most commonly fail in Estonia because of the combination of internal and external causes, lending support for the integrative theory of failure causes, such a finding does not apply in the case of all sizes and ages of firms. For instance, old firms are especially susceptible to fail because of external reasons alone and large firms because of the simultaneous contribution of internal and external reasons. The results of the thesis provide input for bankruptcy prediction by outlining which variables might signal the forthcoming collapse and how

Academic assets, life-cycle, and entrepreneurship: a longitudinal study of Estonian academic workers

This study aimed to find out how academic assets are interconnected with firm creation by academic staff at different academic life-cycle stages. The applied theoretical setting integrated resource-based and life-cycle explanations of academic entrepreneurship. A longitudinal whole population dataset of Estonian academic workers was applied, with a dependent variable reflecting firm creation, and independent variables representing different academic assets. The logistic regression results indicated the varying importance of different academic assets at different academic career stages, while divergence also exists with respect to academic discipline. The results enable postulating several theoretical propositions, accompanied by practical implications for technology transfer at universities

New member in the boardroom and subsequent strategic change in the product-market scope of the firm

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the linkages between the appointment of a new management board member and the following strategic change in the product-market scope of the firm. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on the whole population of Estonian firms, in total 16,941 observations, and the data is retrieved from Estonian Business Register. First, we focus on the association between the appointment of a new board member and the likelihood of different types of strategic change. Second, we focus on the association between the new board member’s previous export experience and the export related strategic change. Logistic regressions are applied for all models. Findings – The results indicate that there is a significant association between the appointment of a new board member and the subsequent start of exports and also continuing it, entrance into a new industry and making a strategic change in more broad terms, though the significance levels vary across the composed models. No significant relationship was found with the entrance into additional geographic market(s) for already exporting firms. There was also a significant association between previous export experience of a new board member and subsequent start of exporting. Originality/value – We look at strategic change in the product-market domain holistically by applying same data on both geographic and product portfolio expansion options. We also introduce the scale and stability contexts of strategic changes. These aspects are usually neglected from similar studies

Do firm failure processes differ across countries: evidence from Finland and Estonia

This study considers the novel topic of comparing firm failure processes between different countries. For seventy bankrupt Finnish firms corresponding pairs are found among Estonian bankrupt firms based on industry, size and time of bankruptcy. Despite the similarity of firms from two countries, the analysis shows remarkable differences in both pre-failure financial data and reasons for failure. Based only on financial data, five failure processes are detected for Finnish and six for Estonian firms. Established failure processes associate with different failure reasons. The study contributes to literature by showing that for similar companies failure processes can differ across countries. In practice, the established information about different failure processes can be applied when building or using bankruptcy prediction models

The Influence of Financial Performance on Payout Policy: a Study of Estonian Firm

Payout (dividend) policy has been a controversial topic for decades. Theoretical and empirical literature has listed dozens of factors that could affect firm’s payout decisions. Current paper analyses the influence of financial performance on firms’ payout decisions based on a large sample of Estonian companies and covers the financial and economic crises period of 2008-2009. The results indicate that past financial performance indicators are poor predictors of future dividends (measured both by payout ratio and the value of dividends). The connection between the dividends paid and future earnings of the firm turned out to be remarkably stronger, i.e. dividends seem to possess some predictive power

Real Estate Bubble Bursts and Government Policy during Crisis: Examples of Estonia, Ireland and Sweden

The objective of current article is to view previous experience with real estate crises and taking into account such experience find suitable policy reactions to overcome the current Estonian crisis as smoothly as possible. Beside overall theoretical guidelines for overcoming the crisis, examples of Sweden and Ireland are viewed. The policy issues suggested for Estonia include some changes in tax laws, avoiding expansionary fiscal policy, making lending stricter and borrower responsible to higher extent, cooperation of different authorities to tackle problem of bad loans, initiating wage and price cut, paying more attention to exporting secto

Failure prediction of government funded start-up firms

This study aims to create a prediction model that would forecast the bankruptcy of government funded start-up firms (GFSUs). Also, the financial development patterns of GFSUs are outlined. The dataset consists of 417 Estonian GFSUs, of which 75 have bankrupted before becoming five years old and 312 have survived for five years. Six financial ratios have been calculated for one (t+1) and two (t+2) years after firms have become active. Weighted logistic regression analysis is applied to create the bankruptcy prediction models and consecutive factor and cluster analyses are applied to outline the financial patterns. Bankruptcy prediction models obtain average classification accuracies, namely 63.8% for t+1 and 67.8% for t+2. The bankrupt firms are distinguished with a higher accuracy than the survived firms, with liquidity and equity ratios being the useful predictors of bankruptcy. Five financial patterns are detected for GFSUs, but bankrupt GFSUs do not follow any distinct patterns that would be characteristic only to them

How does managerial experience predict the internationalization type of a young firm?

This study aims to find out how useful managers' past general and export experience is in predicting whether young manufacturing firms become fast internationalizers. Extant literature about the role of managerial experience in determining young firms' internationalization type is scant. This paper fills this gap by providing systematic evidence on which kinds of general and export experience can be used for accurate predictions of two firm types: born globals and general fast internationalizers. Our dataset encompasses information about managerial experience of the whole population of young Estonian manufacturing firms. Based on using four different prediction methods (logistic regression, rough sets, decision tree, neural networks) and a large variety of variables reflecting managers' past experience, the results indicate that in prediction models, export experience variables are more valuable than general experience variables. Born globals can be predicted with an accuracy of at least 90% in case of all applied machine learning methods, while the precision is lower in case of general fast internationalizers. The study leads to important implications for international business theory and practice

Failure processes of old manufacturing firms in different European countries

This study aims to detect failure processes on the example of old bankrupted European manufacturing firms. Two study designs are applied, namely the original six variables from Laitinen’s (1991) model and an extended dataset with eleven variables for a five-year timespan before declared bankruptcy. On both occasions, two different failure processes are detected which indicate elements of either quickly or gradually failing firms. Clear contingencies between detected processes and firms’ countries of origin exist. There is some evidence that firms of different sizes follow varying failure processes, but this does not apply when discriminating between exporters and non-exporter