Abstract

The aim of this paper is to verify the relevance of technical data analysis which seems to be useful for identifying predictors of bankruptcy of Belgian SMEs. To do so, a sample of 1,860 Belgian companies, including healthy and bankrupt firms, was used. The sample was constituted using Belfirst software (2015). A mixed method data analysis, coupling the Ward aggregation criterion, the method of mobile centres and principal component analysis, was performed on the variables commonly cited in the literature as predictive of corporate bankruptcies. The results of this study show that the use of these methods is not relevant in the context of bankruptcy prediction using this sample, but the results of the logistic regressions did not question the discriminatory power of the introduced active variables.

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