Restructuring in SMEs – A multiple case study analysis

SMEs represent an important pillar in every economy, but in terms of financial performance they are inherently more exposed to financial volatility than large enterprises. Constrained access to resources and the liability of smallness lead to a higher propensity to failure and corporate crisis. A financial crisis is endangering the continued existence of the business, however it can also be perceived as change to reassess and reassemble resources to meet future market requirements. This either takes place through a court-supervised reorganization or through an informal restructuring without the involvement of courts. This paper focuses on the latter and employs a multiple case study including 10 successfully restructured firms and 5 failed renegotiations in Austria. Through use of the resource-based view (RBV) we analyzed what caused crises in SMEs and which strategies and measures are necessary to overcome crisis. In conclusion, it can be stated that crises are predominantly caused internally in SMEs, and successful restructuring frequently requires the engagement of both, banks and entrepreneurs. While innovation capacity is a factor that facilitates restructuring, complex and insufficiently settled family dynamics tend to hinder restructuring

Regeneration of TiO 2 Nanotube Arrays after Long-Term Cell and Tissue Culture for Multiple Use - An Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy (ESEM) Survey of Adult Pig Retina and beyond

Long-term organotypic culture of adult tissues not only open up possibilities for studying complex structures of explants in vitro, but also can be employed e.g. to investigate pathological changes, their fingerprints on tissue mechanics, as well as the effectiveness of drugs. While conventional culture methods do not allow for survival times of more than a few days, we have demonstrated recently that TiO 2 nanotube arrays allow to maintain integrity of numerous tissues, including retina, brain, spline and tonsils, for as long as 2 weeks in vitro. A mystery in culturing has been the interaction of tissue with these substrates, which is also reflected by tissue debris after liftoff. As the latter reveals fingerprints of tissue adhesion and impedes with nanotube array reuse, we address within the present environmental scanning electron study debris nature and the effectiveness of cleaning approaches of distinct physical and chemical methods, including UV-light irradiation, O2 plasma treatment and application of an enzyme-based buffer. This will lays the foundation for large-scale regeneration and reuse of nanotube arrays in science and clinical research. © 2019 The Author(s)

Early surgery? In-house mortality after proximal femoral fractures does not increase for surgery up to 48 h after admission

Purpose The economic cost linked to the increasing number of proximal femur fracture and their postoperative care is immense. Mortality rates are high. As early surgery is propagated to lower mortality and reduce complication rates, a 24-h target for surgery is requested. It was our aim to determine the cut-off for the time to surgery from admission and therefore establish a threshold at which the in-house mortality rate changes. Methods A retrospective single-center cohort study was conducted including 1796 patients with an average age of 82.03 years treated operatively for a proximal femoral fracture between January 2016 and June 2020. A single treatment protocol was performed based on the type of anticoagulant, surgery, and renal function. Patient data, surgical procedure, time to surgery, complications, and mortality were assessed. Results In-house mortality rate was 3.95%, and the overall complication rate was 22.7%. A prolonged length of hospital stay was linked to patient age and occurrence of complications. Mortality is influenced by age, number of comorbidities BMI, and postoperative complications of which the most relevant is pneumonia. The mean time to surgery for the entire cohort was 26.4 h. The investigation showed no significant difference in mortality rate among the two groups treated within 24 h and 24 to 48 h while comparing all patients treated within 48 h and after 48 h revealed a significant difference in mortality. Conclusions Age and number of comorbidities significantly influence mortality rates. Time to surgery is not the main factor influencing outcome after proximal femur fractures, and mortality rates do not differ for surgery up to 48 h after admission. Our data suggest that a 24-h target is not necessary, and the first 48 h may be used for optimizing preoperative patient status if necessary

Investigating the contribution of author- and publication-specific features to scholars' h-index prediction

Evaluation of researchers' output is vital for hiring committees and funding bodies, and it is usually measured via their scientific productivity, citations, or a combined metric such as h-index. Assessing young researchers is more critical because it takes a while to get citations and increment of h-index. Hence, predicting the h-index can help to discover the researchers' scientific impact. In addition, identifying the influential factors to predict the scientific impact is helpful for researchers seeking solutions to improve it. This study investigates the effect of author, paper and venue-specific features on the future h-index. For this purpose, we used machine learning methods to predict the h-index and feature analysis techniques to advance the understanding of feature impact. Utilizing the bibliometric data in Scopus, we defined and extracted two main groups of features. The first relates to prior scientific impact, and we name it 'prior impact-based features' and includes the number of publications, received citations, and h-index. The second group is 'non-impact-based features' and contains the features related to author, co-authorship, paper, and venue characteristics. We explored their importance in predicting h-index for researchers in three different career phases. Also, we examine the temporal dimension of predicting performance for different feature categories to find out which features are more reliable for long- and short-term prediction. We referred to the gender of the authors to examine the role of this author's characteristics in the prediction task. Our findings showed that gender has a very slight effect in predicting the h-index. We found that non-impact-based features are more robust predictors for younger scholars than seniors in the short term. Also, prior impact-based features lose their power to predict more than other features in the long-term.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

House Banks in Out-of-court Reorganization: Evidence from Austria

The main purpose of this article is to study the role of house banks in out-of-court reorganization. Banks are traditionally one of the most important financial resources for firms. Especially in financially difficult times like those we now face due to the coronavirus, it can make a difference whether a bank supports its clients and accompanies firms through a crisis or not. With the help of relationship lending theory, we review the existing literature on this topic. Next, based on empirical findings from Austrian banks, we derive implications for corporate practice. The empirical study covers a sample of 658 firm reorganizations in Austria. The data were collected anonymously by different banks processing the cases in their workout departments between January 2011 and December 2013. Correlation analysis and logistic regression were applied to analyze the data. The findings indicate that house banks, despite their relationship of trust, must be critical in their assessment of reorganization projects due to the danger of zombie lending. The four most important prerequisites for completing an out-of-court reorganization were a new loan, an open and proactive communication policy on the part of the distressed company, management changes, and a financial contribution from existing shareholders. The findings show that bank-supported out-of-court reorganization has a high probability of success. A recommendation to entrepreneurs is to respond rapidly to financial distress and maintain open communication with stakeholders, in particular banks. The findings indicate that the implementation of Directive (EU) 2019/1023 on preventive restructuring frameworks in the European Union is crucial to enable bank-led reorganizations

Business Ethics and Crisis Management: Circumstances for a Second Chance

Discourse regarding ethics and corporate responsibility arose in the last years linked with an increasing number of accounting fraud scandals. The recent financial crisis has had a lasting negative influence on corporate profits. Companies have had to satisfy the interests of several stakeholders, such as its employees, banks, customers and the community, and at the same time successfully manage the consequences of the crisis. An empirical qualitative study which was conducted in Austria in 2008 is presented in this paper aimed at investigating business ethics and crisis management. The stakeholder theory will be used as a reference framework. This paper concludes with lessons that can be learned and political recommendations and policies put forth to grant failed businesses a second chance