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Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2021) | Viewed by 18817

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. German Gemar

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Guest Editor

Department of Economics and Business Administration, University of Malaga, Avda. Cervantes, 2. 29071 Malaga, Spain
Interests: strategic management; firm survival; corporate profitability; efficiency; sustainability; the environment; hospitality; hotels; tourism management; CSR; business; corporate social responsibility; wastewater treatment plants; collection, transport, and treatment of urban waste
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Alberto A. Lopez-Toro

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Guest Editor

University of Malaga. Department of Economics and Business Administration. Avda. Cervantes, 2. 29071 Malaga, Spain
Interests: quality improvement; quality management; total quality management; process improvement; operations management; process management; production management; production/operations management; business administration; solid waste management

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The concept of sustainability can be divided into three dimensions: economic, social, and environmental. It is interesting to know the keys to economic sustainability, without forgetting the social and environmental dimensions.

To help explore quality research on economic sustainability, we present this Special Issue. Our goal is to encourage scientists to publish their experimental and theoretical research related to sustainable economics in organizations.

Strategic management plays a fundamental role in ordering all actions and guiding organizations. Profitability and efficiency must be monitored in organizations, in balance with the legitimate interests of the stakeholders.

It will be helpful to study the survival of organizations in order to predict insolvency and develop early-warning mechanisms to guide us in the right direction.

The objective of this Special Issue is to communicate the latest research findings impacting upon the economic sustainability of organizations. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring together state-of-the-art research on economic sustainability and to analyze its future directions for researchers and practitioners.

Prof. Dr. German Gemar
Prof. Dr. Alberto A. Lopez-Toro
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Corporate Social Responsibility
Economic sustainability
Strategy
Strategic management
Efficiency
Profitability
Business survival
Duration or survival models
Prediction of the insolvency of organization
Bankruptcy

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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23 pages, 819 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Decision Support System for Corporate Tax Arrears Prediction

by Õie Renata Siimon and Oliver Lukason

Sustainability 2021, 13(15), 8363; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13158363 - 27 Jul 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2238

Abstract

This paper proposes a decision support system to predict corporate tax arrears by using tax arrears in the preceding 12 months. Despite the economic importance of ensuring tax compliance, studies on predicting corporate tax arrears have so far been scarce and with modest accuracies. Four machine learning methods (decision tree, random forest, k-nearest neighbors and multilayer perceptron) were used for building models with monthly tax arrears and different variables constructed from them. Data consisted of tax arrears of all Estonian SMEs from 2011 to 2018, totaling over two million firm-month observations. The best performing decision support system, yielding 95.3% accuracy, was a hybrid based on the random forest method for observations with previous tax arrears in at least two months and a logical rule for the rest of the observations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations)

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26 pages, 3191 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Predictive Role of Ex Ante Strategic Firm Characteristics for Sustainable Initial Public Offering (IPO) Survival

by Iftikhar Ahmad, Izlin Ismail and Shahrin Saaid Shaharuddin

Sustainability 2021, 13(14), 8063; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13148063 - 19 Jul 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2955

Abstract

This study attempts to predict how long a newly listed corporation, usually termed initial public offering (IPO), will survive on the equity listing market. The three-fold contribution of this study comprises a hand-collected and substantially expanded dataset for listed IPOs (1990–2017) over a maximum tracking period of 31 years (1990–2020) to predict the IPO survival on emerging Malaysian capital market, the rationale and consequences for unifying the two listing boards (Main Board and Second Board) in 2009, and an investigation of the predictive role of ex ante strategic prospectus information as early warning signals for sustainable survival of Malaysian IPOs. We also make comparisons for the survival profile of IPOs listed on different listing equity boards. We use Cox proportional hazard (PH) model to estimate the empirical results because of the cohort research design of the study. Overall empirical results show that survival curves for IPOs listed on Main Board and Second Board were not statistically different. However, Second Board IPOs remained more vulnerable to hazard. The survival curves for IPOs listed on Main Market and ACE Market are statistically different. Empirical results reveal that high share premium, high listed capital, and longer firm age at listing date significantly increase the survival (reduce hazard) of IPOs listed on the Main Market and the Second Board. However, bigger firm size and elevated risk factors significantly reduce the survival (increase hazard) of the listed IPOs mentioned above. However, share premium is the only variable that has a negative and significant correlation with IPO survival on ACE Market. These results have implications for the regulators, prospective investors, and policymakers of emerging markets, where the IPO prospectus disclosures bridge the information asymmetry gap prevailing due to the nonexistence of public information prior to the IPO. Empirical findings of this study can be generalized to other developing and emerging markets where IPO prospectus substantially mitigates information asymmetry and ex ante strategic firm characteristics act as early warning signals in predicting IPO survival. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations)

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15 pages, 325 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Labor Contracts, Wages and SME Failure

by Nico Dewaelheyns, Cynthia Van Hulle, Yannick Van Landuyt and Mathias Verreydt

Sustainability 2021, 13(14), 7864; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13147864 - 14 Jul 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1859

Abstract

Although employment protection and employee remuneration has been shown to affect many aspects of a firm’s performance, evidence of their ability to explain firm failure is very limited. This paper examines the effect of different types of labor contracts and wages on the probability of corporate failure between 2012 and 2019 using a sample of 29,596 Belgian SMEs. Using discrete time hazard regression models, we find that the use of contract types with lower employment protection and paying lower wages are significant predictors of failure. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations)

17 pages, 710 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Key Ratios for Long-Term Prediction of Hotel Financial Distress and Corporate Default: Survival Analysis for an Economic Stagnation

by Antonio Pelaez-Verdet and Pilar Loscertales-Sanchez

Sustainability 2021, 13(3), 1473; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13031473 - 31 Jan 2021

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3050

Abstract

Hospitality companies often face economic crises, which stress their financial structure. In 2008, Spanish hotels were jeopardized when the travelers’ flows became stagnated, in either domestic and foreign markets. Most of them overcame the crisis, but not all, in part depending on their capital structure at the moment the downturn loomed upon them. This study analyzes the financial ratios registered in 2008 by 3.341 Spanish lodging enterprises, to find out the most relevant ratios that were associated with an eventual breakdown. The analyzed ratios have been largely suggested by previous literature for anticipating financial distress; however, using survival tables and Kaplan–Meier estimates we could also find new insights about several promising variates for future research. In the end, by performing a Cox regression, we could isolate the return on capital employed (ROCE) ratio as a long-term predictor for small hotels’ bankruptcy after a market downturn. Moreover, the legal status seems to be a key predictor concerning medium-sized hotels. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations)

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15 pages, 314 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network for Bankruptcy Prediction: A Case of the Restaurant Industry

by Rafael Becerra-Vicario, David Alaminos, Eva Aranda and Manuel A. Fernández-Gámez

Sustainability 2020, 12(12), 5180; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su12125180 - 25 Jun 2020

Cited by 20 | Viewed by 3365

Abstract

Using logistic regression technique and Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network, this study seeks to improve the capacity of existing bankruptcy prediction models for the restaurant industry. In addition, we have verified, in the review of existing literature, the gap in the research of restaurant bankruptcy models with sufficient time in advance and that only companies in the restaurant sector in the same country are considered. Our goal is to build a restaurant bankruptcy prediction model that provides high accuracy, using information distant from the bankruptcy situation. We had a sample of Spanish restaurants corresponding to the 2008–2017 period, composed of 460 solvent and bankrupt companies, for which a total of 28 variables were analyzed, including some of a non-financial nature, such as age of restaurant, quality, and belonging to a chain. The results indicate that the best bankruptcy predictors are financial variables related to profitability and indebtedness and that Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network exceeds logistic regression in predictive capacity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations)

Review

Jump to: Research

19 pages, 3347 KiB

Open AccessReview

Mapping the Knowledge of CSR and Sustainability

by Eva M. Sánchez-Teba, María Dolores Benítez-Márquez, Guillermo Bermúdez-González and María del Mar Luna-Pereira

Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10106; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su131810106 - 09 Sep 2021

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 4474

Abstract

This paper focuses on two concepts frequently used and studied by researchers: corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability. In recent decades, many authors have questioned the relevance and connection between the two topics. A bibliometric analysis will be carried out with SciMAT over the period 2003–2021, to understand the evolution and relationship of the aforementioned terms, but also to show the relevance of the link between the different clusters, and to observe the breakdown of the driving themes over the period 2003–2021. The final purpose is to draw conclusions and indicate possible trends that will drive the path of CSR and sustainability, thus increasing scientific knowledge. The results show that the number of articles related to CSR and sustainability is steadily increasing and that the main driving themes have been CSR, sustainability and environment. Furthermore, a link between CSR, sustainability and business has been found in the analysis of the different thematic networks. The future direction of the research could be marked by a further development of the new driving themes, among which stakeholder focus and branding image stand out. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Sustainability: Strategy, Efficiency, Profitability, and Prediction of the Insolvency of Organizations)

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