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Conflicting results have emerged from several past studies as to whether bankruptcy prediction models are able to forecast corporate failure more accurately than auditors’ going‐concern opinions. Nevertheless, the last decade has seen improved modelling of the path‐to‐failure of financially distressed firms over earlier static models of bankruptcy. In the light of the current crisis facing the auditing profession, this study evaluates the efficacy of auditors’ going‐concern opinions in comparison to two bankruptcy prediction models. Bankrupt firms in the U.S. service and trade industry sectors were used to compare model predictions against the auditors’ going‐concern opinion for two years prior to firm failure. The two models are the well‐known Altman (1968) Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) model that includes only financial ratio variables in its formulation and the newer, temporal logit model of Cybinski (2000, 2003) that includes explicit factors of the business cycles in addition to variables internal to the firm. The results show overall better bankruptcy classification rates for the temporal model than for the Altman model or audit opinion.

By utilizing a large sample of firms during the period 2006–2017, the author determine which types of firms are more likely to go bankrupt. The author shows that over-leveraged firms have significantly higher probability of going bankrupt, which highlight the importance of the concept of optimal corporate capital structure. The author finds that private firms and export-oriented firms experience lower hazard rates. Proposed hazard statistical model highlights that more profitable firms, firms with better liquidity, firms with more tangible assets and larger firms all have statistically higher survival rates. The author finds that bankruptcy rates are the lowest among service firms and the highest in construction industry. Ownership variables indicate that state-owned firms, firms with foreign ownership and firms, owned by holdings, are less likely to fail, all else equal. Finally, the author demonstrates that proposed statistical model successfully predicts the probability of bankruptcy. The mean cumulative hazard function for a group of surviving firms is statistically significantly lower compared to a group of failing firms. In order to survive in a long run, firm’s management should especially be aware of their optimal capital structure and use rather less leverage than going over the sustainable level.

The paper aims to explore the optimal strategies of inventory financing when the risk-averse retailer has different objectives, in the presence of multi-risk, i.e. demand risk, non-operational risk and retailer's strategic default risk.

This paper develops an inventory financing model consisting of a bank and a risk-averse retailer with strategic default. This paper considers two scenarios, i.e. the capital-constrained retailer cares about its profit or firm value. In the first scenario, the bank acts as a Stackelberg leader determining its interest rate, and the retailer acts as a follower determining its pledged quantity. In the second one, the bank capital market is perfectly competitive. Lagrange multiplier method is adopted to solve the optimization.

The optimal strategies in inventory financing scheme in two scenarios are derived. Only when the initial stock is relatively high, the retailer pledges part of the initial stock. Retailer's risk aversion reduces its pledged quantity and performance. The strategic default reduces its profit. When it is relatively high, the bank refuses to offer the loan.

Analytical inventory and financing strategies are specified to help retailers and banks to better understand the interaction of finance and operations management and to better respond to multi-risk.

New results and managerial insights are derived by incorporating partially endogenous strategic default and risk aversion into inventory financing, which enriches the interfaces of operations management and finance.

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During the first quarter of 2002, almost 10,000 US‐based businesses filed for bankruptcy. Some companies were doomed to failure from the start due to poor capital or management. Others were once successful but due to overstretching resources, were failing to make payroll each week. Like those who ignore the first signs of illness and do not consult a doctor, those involved ignored the symptoms and stood around and waited for their companies to disintegrate.

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The purpose of this paper is to review the four large and two small fluctuations in China’s economic growth since the reform and opening up, which can be further divided into five periods of economic upturn and six periods of economic downturn.

This paper also analyzes the performance, causes and practical countermeasures of these fluctuations and summarizes the experience and lessons from the eight aspects of dealing with economic downturn and stabilizing growth since the reform and opening up.

At last, the paper puts forward some measures to cope with economic downturn and stabilize growth under the new normal in the new era.

Any country’s economic growth is a tortuous process with many fluctuations. The rate of economic growth cannot rise or go down straight for a long time, and China’s economic growth is no exception. The drastic fluctuations of economic growth can lead to serious overproduction, waste of resources, increased unemployment, decreased income or supply shortages, rising prices and decline of living standards.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between regulation, market discipline and banking distress.

To address the empirical question put forward above, a multivariate logit model is applied to an international sample of 586 banks from 21 European countries in the period between 2000 and 2012. To give robustness to the results, different variables have been used to test the role played by market discipline and regulation as well as an alternative methodology known as duration/survival analysis.

It can be found that market discipline is a good indicator in signalling banking distress, that is, market discipline has penalized more banks with a higher likelihood of being in distress. Nonetheless, as broadly acknowledged, market discipline was not sufficient per se to avoid banking distress in Europe. With regard to regulation, this paper evidences that the adoption of other regulatory measures beyond the simple transposition of changes occurred in the EU Directives such as borrower-based measures and limits on pre-emptive exposures’ concentration, have contributed toward reducing the probability of distress of EU banks, showing that the introduction of this kind of measures was necessary and relevant. In addition, in this paper, it can be found that the NPL ratio, size, capital (including the well-known regulatory capital ratio, as well as the novel leverage ratio which discards the risk weights present in the former one) and liquidity are good indicators of banking distress which lead us to conclude that the new regulatory framework known as Basel III is on the right path to mitigate the probability that a new banking crisis similar to the last one takes place again.

The first limitation regards the period of time chosen, that is, from 2000 to 2012, empirically neglecting, to some extent the important regulatory changes occurred after the aforementioned period. Nonetheless, as mentioned in the Data and Methodology section, the period ends in 2012 because it is difficult to flag a reasonable number of banks’ bailouts afterwards, to properly run the type of model used in this paper. The second limitation is the fact that the possible changes in the risk management and risk assessment by institutions and in the behaviour of investors, acknowledge as weak and inappropriate before the on-set of the global financial crisis, albeit very relevant, are not in the scope of this paper.

Despite the welcomed changes performed by regulators so far, some aspects are not complete yet and new areas deserve more empirical work and attention by the regulators and supervisors. Some of them stem directly from the results obtained from this paper such as the enhancement and a close monitoring of the current Pillar 3 framework the increase of the adoption of more targeted tools, in a more preemptive way, to counter the build-up of risks and the implementation of the leverage ratio.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the identification of leading indicators signalling emerging risks to the banking system has become a major priority to central banks and supervisory authorities. As a consequence, several studies have formulated the aim of analysing predictive characteristics of a set of macroeconomic variables, such as GDP Growth, Credit-to-GDP, Inflation, M2-to-GDP, among others. Other studies take a different perspective and complement the analysis with bank-specific risk indicators. Nonetheless the aforementioned studies do not consider the relationship between regulation and market discipline and banking distress. This is the gap the authors wanted to fill, and this assessment is the main contribution of this paper.

Although it has been argued that overconfidence can lead to failure (Hayward et al., forthcoming), business failure can undermine assumptions about the self that are integral to (1) confidence in one's decision-making accuracy and (2) the motivation to engage in tasks.

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The Asian financial turmoil has resulted in widespread corporate difficulties and collapses in the Asia‐Pacific region. There is an urgent need of corporate recovery and insolvency administration in the area. This paper aims at reviewing and analysing the insolvency law and practices in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Foreign investors should possess the above knowledge in order to better protect themselves with their investments in the PRC. It is also envisaged that with improvement in corporate recovery procedures and reforms in insolvency administration, the PRC can pursue its economic performance further in the twenty‐first century with its accession to the World Trade Organisation.

This case focuses on the business rescue of South African Airlines. SAA, four times rated the best airline in Africa (SAA, 2019), was already insolvent when in early 2020 COVID-19 decimated the world. The state-owned airline, which had last made profits in 2011, continued to lose millions of passengers to competitors over the next decade and, despite bailouts of more than R40bn, entered Business Rescue in December 2019, still owing creditors more than R26bn. To the surprise of many, Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan was determined to rescue the airline. In May 2021, the business rescue practitioners handed SAA back to the interim board and Thomas Kgokolo (CA) (MBA) was appointed interim CEO. In June 2021, Gordhan announced a “born again” SAA, “almost ready to take off” and promised no more bailouts. But, with several billion rand outstanding to complete the rescue plan, a grounded fleet, unresolved labour problems, an critical but unnamed “strategic-equity partner” and a largely unvaccinated country entering its third COVID wave – what were the chances?

Within the framework of a country desperately in need of jobs and short of capital, the case raises questions about ethics, accountability, responsibility, management, economics and strategy. Should retrenched workers in airlines feel the consequences of their unfortunate career choices? Ought government’s bail-out already failed industries? Should governments run airlines? What sources of funds are available? Have all the necessary requirements for “restructuring” to succeed been satisfied?

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CSS 11: Strategy.

MBA, Exec-ed.