ABSTRACT:
It is well known that the majority of the studies about bankruptcy prediction models aims at developing innovative tools, with ever increasing performances. Nevertheless, since a few years a new tendency has emerged, that aims at assessing the expendability of this tool. Hence it is necessary to focus on the models’ operative usability and profitability. The authors believe that this perspective requires some preparatory and consequential steps: 1) assessing the tool’s economic and organizational sustainability (efficiency); 2) assessing the tool’s reliability (effectiveness); 3) implementing the selected tools within evaluation processes of firms’ future operative status. This study aims at contributing to this emerging strand of research, presenting the results of the monitoring activity realized on limited companies and cooperatives placed in the Emilia-Romagna region with at least 200 employees. This monitoring activity concerned the future operative status of those firms and was performed using bankruptcy prediction models. In particular, the study aims at assessing if the recent recession caused by 2008 global crisis is going to influence the future operative status of the two investigated kinds of firms (cooperatives and limited companies). The analysis tries to answer two research questions: Q1) Did the economic recession emerged after 2008 crisis equally affected both kinds of firms’ future operative conditions? Q2) If not, which kind of firms between the investigated ones was able to better react to the effects of the recent economic crisis? The research aims at verifying two main hypothesis: H1) 2008 economic recession differently affected the two investigated kinds of firms; H2) cooperatives’ features enable to better absorb recession’s effects. Hence cooperatives have more enduring chances than limited companies. The research’s purpose was pursued with a traditional deductive-inductive methodological approach. It is relevant to highlight that the analysis performed during the inductive phase followed an ex ante approach. This means that during the definition of the sample, only limited companies and cooperatives that were operating in 2016 were considered. Therefore, the physiological or pathological status of the firms wasn’t known a priori, as it would be following an ex post reasoning approach, which is more frequently used. Bankruptcy prediction tools were applied on the balance sheets of the last six years. Then, analysing the obtained scores’ trend, some judgements about the evolution of the operative status of the investigated firms were made. The results confirmed the research hypothesis: the recent economic recession differently affected the two investigated types of firm and the cooperatives proved to be more effective in absorbing the negative consequences deriving from 2008 crisis.
KEYWORDS: global economic crisis (2008); bankruptcy prediction models; limited companies; mutual companies.
