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This study investigates the relationship between foreign ownership, earnings quality and overinvestment in Japanese zombie firms.

The study makes use of data from Japanese firms listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2019. The study employs logistic and multinomial logistic models to test whether the overinvestment behavior of zombie firms is mitigated by foreign shareholdings and earnings quality.

The results show that (1) zombie firms tend to overinvest; (2) an increase in foreign ownership mitigates the overinvestment of zombie firms and (3) the mitigation of zombie firms' overinvestment by foreign ownership is stronger with higher earnings quality.

This study extends the discussion of earnings quality and investment efficiency to the zombie firm setting. Previous studies in accounting suggest that high earnings quality enhances firms' investment efficiency. The findings suggest that both a change in ownership structure and high-quality accounting information are necessary to mitigate the inefficiency of zombie firms.

Cultural perceptions of the zombie have shifted dramatically in the twenty-first century. No longer only associated with anxiety and fear, zombie fiction often appeals to pleasure. One source of pleasure comes from ludification, the process whereby game-like principals and gameful elements shape non-game activities. Increasingly, print fiction borrows from games and uses ludic elements to shape narratives. As such, it has become embedded in convergence culture, a dynamic media ecology where top down processes compete with bottom up processes. This chapter argues that ludified zombie fiction brings this media ecology into sharp relief, revealing ways that gamification and ludification are just as apt to reinforce capitalist processes of commodification and neo-liberal ideologies of power as they are to dismantle them. Through a close reading of three contemporary zombie fictions, this chapter exposes tensions and contradictions in ludification. The dead body of the zombie, the nihilistic landscape of the post-zombie apocalypse and the futility of human endeavour in the face of walking death are all elements of genre that undercut the gamified pursuit of external utility-oriented goals. The chapter explores these knotty ethical and ideological problems, not only considering the zombie apocalypse as a gameful space for rethinking social organisation, but also recognising it as a platform for the promotion of neo-liberal ideologies that perpetuate existing power inequalities through coercive disciplinary regimes.

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.

The contemporary zombie genre is known for exploring what the end will look like, with its widespread infection, chaos and violence – all images that resonate in a post-9/11 America. These zombie narratives also speak to a present-day America with their emphasis on diminishing individuality and agency. Unlike early Haitian incarnations of the zombie figure, the modern zombie terrifies because no singular agent possesses the victim’s mind. In contrast, the light-hearted CW television show, iZombie (2015–) rethinks the zombie paradigm. Not only does it envision how zombies would manifest in everyday life, without the requisite apocalypse, but it also subverts the antiquated gender politics common to the genre by providing viewers with a female zombie protagonist, Olivia Moore (Rose McIver) who is not only highly functional, but also female and with plenty of agency. Moore, through whose eyes the show is told, absorbs personality traits and memories belonging to the brains she eats, from frat boy to alcoholic, stripper to housewife. This device creates such a cornucopia of roles for McIver to explore that it brings to mind the work of American photographer Cindy Sherman, providing a rare multi-dimensional woman on TV. iZombie also takes the contemporary zombie text’s reliance on the trop of infection one step further. This chapter not only examines iZombie’s unusual female point of view, but also its portrayal of ‘zombie-ness’ as a chronic contagious illness with many similarities to HIV.

Introduction: The word “zombie” is associated with the “living dead” in our minds from horror movies we watch on TV. Recently, this concept has been used frequently to identify the firms that are still standing while they should have been closed long ago. Zombie firms are apparently active, but their cash flows are only used to compensate interest expense of their debts. Banks prefer to re-finance these firms and restructure their sunken loans rather than following their debts and moving them out of the bank’s balance sheets. However, these inefficient and unproductive firms also consume the capital that can be transferred to more productive firms. Therefore, these firms live as long as the cash inflow, which is considered as fresh blood and meat for the living dead-zombie, and they consume the resources of other living healthy firms.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate the existence of zombie firms which are listed in Borsa İstanbul manufacturing industry.

Methodology: The research period is between the years 2008 and 2018, and interest coverage ratio (ICR) is used for Borsa İstanbul manufacturing firms. There are several explanations of zombie firms in the literature, which are commonly constructed on a scope of profitability of a firm. In this research, the OECD’s preferred explanation and classification of zombies is chosen which describes a zombie firm as having an ICR (operating earnings to interest expenses) which is less than 1 over three consecutive years.

Findings: It has been noted from this research that ICRs differ in the research period of Borsa İstanbul manufacturing industry firms. About 62 of 109 firms traded on Borsa İstanbul manufacturing industry between 2008 and 2018 were classified as zombie firms because they had ICRs below one for three consecutive years or over.

This paper reviews the literature on zombie firms to provide a holistic view by delineating their formation, impact, widespread nature, prevention and policy implications.

This paper uses a systematic literature review methodology, in which 76 papers published in journals ranked on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) 2022 list were reviewed. The study period was from 2000 to 2022.

Among the main findings, the widespread problems of zombie firms were evident. The authors found that consistent support, either in the form of government grants or a weak financial framework, was responsible for their formation. The suboptimal performance of factors of production, depressed job creation, low innovation and overall negative impact on economic activity are the consequences of zombification. This can be controlled by ensuring better bankruptcy codes, focused on government assistance, technology use and better due diligence by banks.

This review serves as a reference point for future researchers as a cohesive and holistic study presenting a full picture of the problem, so that the proposed solutions are robust and tenable.

This review is among the initial attempts to comprehensively study published work on zombie firms in terms of analyzing their region-specific nature, with an emphasis on definition, causes, impact and prevention.

The purpose of this paper is to distinguish the economic foundations of post‐Communist capitalism and to examine the key economic problems of this type of society in the context of the modern financial crisis.

This question is approached by studying the “necroeconomy” as a phenomenon of post‐Communist capitalism and the international experience of the dead firms, so‐called “zombie‐firms”, which do exist and “successfully” function in the most developed of economies as well with Japan being the most obvious example. Unlike developed economies, which are exposed to the threat of the zombie‐ing of the economy under the conditions of a financial crisis, this threat is even greater for the countries of post‐Communist capitalism owing also to their exposure to necroeconomy.

It is found that the financial crisis creates the favourable conditions for the zombie‐ing of a necroeconomy. If in Japan, for example, the zombie‐economy never touched the processing industries, then one of the qualities of the necroeconomy is to concentrate exactly upon this sector of the economy. The zombie‐ing of a necroeconomy inevitably amounts to the zombie‐ing of this already‐dead sector as well.

The value of the paper is to determine the carriers of the necroeconomic and zombie‐economic routines – Homo Transformaticus and Zombie Economicus, respectively. The contemporary financial crisis creates the danger of the transformation of Homo Transformaticus into a Zombie Economicus.

The zombie-plague apocalypse is a powerful social imaginary that focuses attention on the border between legitimate citizens and zombie “others.” The surge in the number of zombie apocalypse films provides an illuminating area for studying the role imagined for public administration by popular culture. The response to zombies in apocalyptic films brings to fore new realities with the re-conceptualization of the legitimacy and authority of government. This re-conceptualization provides content for analyzing the portrayal of existing governmental institutions overwhelmed by the apocalypse, including local governments, the military, public health agencies, emergency services, and public utilities,