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Corporate failure remains a critical financial concern, with implications for both firms and financial institutions; this paper aims to review the literature that proposes corporate failure prediction models for the twenty-first century.

This paper gathers information from 106 published articles that contain corporate failure prediction models. The focus of the analysis is on the elements needed to design corporate failure prediction models (definition of failure, sample approach, prediction methods, variables and evaluation metrics and performance). The in-depth review creates a synthesis of current trends, from the view of those elements.

Both consensus and divergences emerge regarding the design of corporate failure prediction models. On the one hand, authors agree about the use of bankruptcy as a definition of failure and that at least two evaluation metrics are needed to examine model performance for each class, individually and in general. On the other hand, they disagree about data collection procedures. Although several explanatory variables have been considered, all of them serve as complements for the primarily used financial information. Finally, the selection of prediction methods depends entirely on the research objective. These discrepancies suggest fundamental advances in discovery and establish valuable ideas for further research.

This paper reveals some caveats and provides extensive, comprehensible guidelines for corporate failure prediction, which researchers can leverage as they continue to investigate this critical financial subject. It also suggests fruitful directions to develop further experiments.

This study investigates the connection between corporate governance and zombie firm’s exit time.

With a sample of 2,794 French zombie firms, the analysis focuses on four aspects of corporate governance: board size (BS), managerial ownership (MO), director turnover (DT) and ownership concentration, using tobit regression.

Dimensions of corporate governance have an important role in determining zombie firms’ exit time. MO and ownership concentration increase zombie firm exit time, whereas larger BSs and DT reduce it.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to include corporate governance as a characteristic relevant to zombie firms’ exit time. It provides new insights on why some zombie firms remain in the market longer than expected.

This study aims to explore the strategic impact of R&D and export activity on the diverse dimensions of US manufacturing firms’ performance. It also explores, using a predictive analytic model, the interactive synergistic effect that R&D and exports have on firm performance.

This study presents an innovative two-stage regression-neural network approach. Complementing conventional statistical analysis, the predictive backpropagation neural network explores the relative impact of R&D and exports and their synergistic effect on firm performance.

This study demonstrates the significant and positive effect of R&D and export strategy/activity on the economic performance of leading US manufacturing firms, particularly on their market-based performance (i.e. sustained growth rate or SGR). Furthermore, this study finds that the synergistic effect of R&D and exports on short-term performance (i.e. return on investment) is positive in high-tech firms but negative in low-tech firms. However, the synergistic effect on SGR is increasingly positive regardless of the level of technology.

In addition to traditional statistical analysis, this study uniquely investigates the relative importance of selected strategic variables, along with R&D and export activity and their differential synergistic effects, for firms’ economic performance in contrasting industry settings (high-tech vs low-tech).

This paper investigates the main drivers of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows for a balanced panel of 11 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) economies over the 1995–2017 annual period. The author postulates that the impacts of the main pull (growth) and push (global financial conditions, GFC) factors may not be invariant to endogenously estimated thresholds for structural domestic conditions (SDCs) including trade and capital account openness, financial development, human capital (HC) and natural resource endowments.

The author investigates whether the main SDC provide endogenous thresholds for the impacts of basic pull and push factors on FDI inflows for the MENA sample by employing panel fixed effects threshold procedure of Hansen (1999). As a robustness check, the author also present the results of the dynamic panel data two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, which explicitly consider the potential endogeneity of SDC along with main pull factor for the evolution of FDI inflows.

Growth, GFC and SDC are important drivers of FDI inflows. The impacts of SDC tend to be higher in countries with higher financial depth, openness to international trade and finance and lower natural resource and HC endowments. The sensitivities of FDI inflows to GFC are substantially higher in the countries which are more open to international trade and capital flows and higher levels of financial depth. FDI inflows are found to be pro-cyclical and this pro-cyclicality tends to be much higher for the episodes exceeding the SDC thresholds.

Improving SDC including higher openness to international trade and finance and financial development may be effective in encouraging FDI inflows. The findings support an argument that, better SDC are crucially important not only for attracting FDI but also achieving the growth benefits of FDI inflows. Therefore, improving SDC appears to be an important growth-oriented policy agenda for emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) including MENA.

The impacts of the main push and pull factors on FDI (and capital) inflows may be nonlinear. The literature often tackles the nonlinearity issue either by some interaction specifications or imposing exogenous thresholds. The literature, however, is yet to comprehensively investigate whether the main SDC provide endogenous thresholds for the impacts of basic pull and push factors. The author aims to contribute to the literature by estimating endogenous SDC threshold levels for the impacts of the main determinants of FDI flows for MENA.

This study aims to analyse the patterns of growth and income disparities and to have a future insight about its behaviour across 22 Indian states for the period from 1980-1981 to 2010-2011.

This paper uses a three-stage methodological procedures to arrive at the results. First, the distributional aspect of per capita income has been analyzed by using Kuznets’s Inverted-U Hypothesis. Second, to analyse the relative performance across India states, the Shift Analysis Technique has been utilized. Finally, analyzing the future aspect of the growth and disparities among the low-, middle- and high-income states a catch process has been performed.

The empirical results rejects the Kuznets’s hypothesis for both aggregate and sectoral incomes across Indian states. The relative performance of Indian states shows signs of decreasing the income disparities over the time with a positive shift. Finally, the catch-up process among the low-, middle- and high-income states suggests different time bands for each group to narrow down or eliminate the income disparities in future.

This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, examining the sectoral growth and disparities across Indian states by testing the Kuznets’s Inverted-U Hypothesis to highlight the specification issue; second, to measure the relative performance of Indian states over the time that can help us to find out the individual states that are purely responsible for income disparities in India. Finally, estimates of catch-up speed among Indian states provide a prediction about their behaviour to eradicate the disparities in future.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the understanding of the long-debated impact of board busyness within a new framework of firm efficiency in the selected developed and developing Asia–Pacific countries, by assessing the moderation of directors' education towards the relationship between board busyness and firm efficiency. The extant literature on board busyness demonstrates to a lack of clarification of the relationship between board busyness and firm efficiency.

The sample for this paper comprises a panel data of 800 firms in a cross-country context of the selected developed and developing Asia–Pacific countries during the recent period of 2009–2015. This paper performs a non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis to measure firm efficiency and panel regression analysis to examine the moderation of directors' education.

This paper provides support for the busyness hypothesis by documenting that the busy boards are likely to reduce firm efficiency. Moreover, this paper renders support to the upper-echelons theory by demonstrating that the impact of board busyness on firm efficiency is likely to turn positive in the presence of directors' education.

This paper highlights practical implication for managers especially in the Asia–Pacific region who seek to enhance firm efficiency, which is essential for firms in attaining the primary goal of profit maximization.

This paper builds on the extant literature by providing a contemporary research path regarding the moderation of directors' education to explain the long-debated impact of board busyness within a new framework of firm efficiency, based on a recent and significant sample of Asia–Pacific countries.