The aim of this study was to investigate whether firms’ reporting delays are interconnected with bankruptcy risk and its financial determinants. This study was based on 698,189 firm-year observations from Estonia. Annual report submission delay, either in a binary or ordinal form, was used as the dependent variable, while bankruptcy risk based on an international model or the financial ratios determining it were the independent variables. The findings indicated that firms with lower values of liquidity and annual and accumulated profitability were more likely to delay the submission of an annual report over the legal deadline. In turn, firm leverage was not interconnected with reporting delays. In addition, firms with a higher risk of bankruptcy were more likely to delay the submission of their annual reports. Firms with different ages, sizes and industries varied in respect to the obtained results. Different stakeholders should be aware that when reporting delays occur, these can be conditioned by higher bankruptcy risk or poor performance, and thus, for instance, crediting such firms should be treated with caution. State institutions controlling timely submission should take strict(er) measures in cases of firms delaying for a lengthy period.

This paper aims to extract firm failure processes (FFPs) by using failure risk and rank the importance of failure risk contributors for different stages of FFPs. The dataset is composed of 1234 bankrupt firms from different European countries and three theoretically motivated FFPs are detected. For the dominant FFP found (73% of cases), failure risk becomes high very shortly before bankruptcy is declared. Annual and accumulated profitability are the most important failure risk contributors for these stages of all FFPs, where failure probability exceeds 50%. The obtained results provide important implications for bankruptcy prediction research and practice, especially in terms of identifying the most important financial predictors.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to find out which different failure processes exist among the young manufacturing micro firms, and whether the representation of those processes differs first, in European countries, and second, among exporting and non-exporting firms. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on financial data of 1,216 manufacturing micro firms from European countries. Failure processes have been detected with a two stage-method: by extracting latent dimensions from financial variables with factor analysis, and then, by clustering the established factor scores. Findings With firms’ age, the number of different failure processes reduces from four to two. Strong evidence was found about the dominance of different failure processes in different countries for most firm age groups. Failure processes are not strongly associated with (non-)exporting. Originality/value This paper is the first one determining young manufacturing micro firms’ failure processes and comparing the representation of those processes in different firm subsets, either based on their country of origin or (non-)exporting behavior. Moreover, previous studies have not encompassed specific sectors, young or very small firms.

The objective of the study is to examine the impact of both the number and types of causes of business failure on the failure risk as indicated by values of bankruptcy scores during the process of business decline. Causes of bankruptcy were obtained from court judgments for 70 Estonian manufacturing firms and classified into two taxonomies-the number of causes and the different types of causes of failure such as internal (different management deficiencies) or from factors external to the firm. Bankruptcy scores for the first and second pre-bankruptcy years were calculated using both Ohlson's model and a local (Grünberg's) bankruptcy prediction model. Independent samples median tests were applied to examine, whether different causes are associated with different failure risk. Findings indicate that multiple causes lead to a significantly higher bankruptcy risk than a single cause for the year prior to the declaration of bankruptcy. On the contrary, no significant effect of different types of failure causes was found on the risk of failure. Implications of the results for research and practice are discussed.

Purpose This paper aims to study how firms’ export behavior is associated with their corporate governance. Design/methodology/approach This study uses whole population data of Estonian small and medium-sized enterprises: 9,530 exporters and 73,619 non-exporters. Several theory-driven corporate governance variables and exporting variables (based on previous studies) are used. Binary logistic regression is applied to study how exporters’ corporate governance differs from that of non-exporters. Eight additional continuous dependent variables are used to portray exporters’ internationalization with ordinary least squares regression. The robustness of the obtained base results is checked for younger/older and smaller/larger firms. Findings Having female board members did not lead to a higher likelihood of export activities. Experience – tenure’s length, board members’ age and other board memberships – provided mixed results. Having a larger board was associated with a higher export propensity and larger exports but a lower export share. A larger share of a chief executive officer’s shareholding was associated with lower export propensity, exporting less overall and activities on a smaller number of markets. The presence of a majority owner was associated with larger export share and export turnover, but more focus on the main export market. Firm age and size affected the results. Originality/value Previous studies about the interconnection of corporate governance and exporting have relied on varied theoretical explanations and limited sets of variables. This paper provides an extensive insight by using corporate governance variables emergent from various theoretical explanations accompanied by a large set of dependent exporting variables. The latter enables obtaining a more holistic view of the interconnection between the two phenomena.