Learning about firms' failing path : an explanation through annual reports information

"Learning about failure" represents a sort of thread between the three chapters. My interest toward this topic arose during the first year of my Ph.D. program by reading some literature (e.g. Thornhill and Amit, 2003). These considerations represent an important premise of my work whose aim is to address an issue recently pointed out (Cybinski, 2001): understanding, rather than only predicting, enterprise failure presents an enormous theoretical challenge that, at the moment, has largely gone unanswered. So, the first chapter examines failure as a path and emphasizes relations between time dimension, failure stages and accounting information. The second chapter puts under the magnifying glass the path to failure of Sunbeam Corp. which has emerged as an outlier from the statistical analysis conducted in the first chapter. Lastly, the third chapter analyzes the fraud and no-tort cases considered in the first chapter from a different point of view: it examines FASB outstanding exposure draft on a proposed standard on management’s responsibility to evaluate a company’s ability to continue as a going concern.