Corporate characteristics and firm’s financial fragility: evidence from Kazakhstan

Zhandos Ybrayev (), Serik Rustanov and Aknur Baglanova
Additional contact information
Zhandos Ybrayev: National Bank of Kazakhstan
Serik Rustanov: National Bank of Kazakhstan
Aknur Baglanova: National Bank of Kazakhstan

International Economics and Economic Policy, 2025, vol. 22, issue 4, No 1, 19 pages

Abstract: Abstract Our aim is to examine the link between corporate financial health indicators and the firms’ overall financial fragility in an emerging market economy. In this paper, we use administrative firm-level data that covers small, medium, and large firms in a de-identified form and come from the Bureau of National Statistics of Kazakhstan. We utilize various components of balance sheet and income financial statement indicators to calculate Altman EM Z-score as a measure of corporate vulnerability. We report the following main results. First, we document evidence that firms in Kazakhstan with high leverage and large size are more financially vulnerable. The size effect is the most noticeable in the sectors of construction, trade, and mining, while the impact of leverage is more apparent in agriculture and construction. Second, we find that firms with more liquid assets and higher age are less financially vulnerable. Third, we see that firms that eventually become bankrupt have significantly lower EM Z-scores than the average value of non-bankrupt firms. Finally, we observe that firms with a bank loan are more financially vulnerable than firms without a bank loan.

Keywords: Corporate debt; Financial fragility; Emerging markets; Kazakhstan; F34; G15; G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10368-025-00678-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:iecepo:v:22:y:2025:i:4:d:10.1007_s10368-025-00678-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10368/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10368-025-00678-4

Access Statistics for this article

International Economics and Economic Policy is currently edited by Paul J.J. Welfens, Holger C. Wolf, Christian Pierdzioch and Christian Richter

More articles in International Economics and Economic Policy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().