THE FIRM’s FAILURE PROCESSES IN ASIAN MAJOR ECONOMIES: THE APPLICATION OF CLUSTERING TECHNIQUES

Saif ur Rehman; Hashim Khan; Sharif Ullah Jan

Saif ur Rehman Associate Professor, Finance and Accounting, Canadian University Dubai, UAE
Hashim Khan Assistant Professor, Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS University, Islamabad
Sharif Ullah Jan Lecturer, Department of Management Sciences, FATA University, TSD Darra, NMD Kohat

Keywords: Financial Ratios, Default Risk, Clustering Techniques, Bankrupt Firms, Asian Economies

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine firm’s failure processes (FFPs) by applying different clustering techniques on the dataset of 520 bankrupt manufacturing firms from various Asian countries and divide them into two groups based on their governance scoring reported by international governance index. The short-term failure is quite high in countries where governance scoring is low while long term failure is more prominent in high ranked countries. This shows three motivated FFPs and in case of dominant FFP, the study finds that firm’s default risk befits increase shortly even earlier the bankruptcy is confirmed. The accumulated and annual profitability of firm is the most significant predictor of firm’s failure risk for all the three firms’ FFPs for the firms having failure probability more than 50%. Results of the study provide an important breakthrough in research of bankruptcy forecast and practices, precisely in terms of exploring the most significant determinants. This study also fills the gap by addressing the ignored area of constituents of failure risks during various FFPs.