Company scaling and its deviations: New indicators for enterprise evaluation and bankruptcy prediction

Jing Xu, Xi Chen, Lei Wen and Jiang Zhang

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 10, 1-23

Abstract: Many studies have shown that scaling laws widely exist in various complex systems, such as living organisms, cities, and online communities. In this research, we found that scaling laws also hold for companies. The macroscopic variables of companies, such as incomes, expenses, or total liability, all have power-law relationships with respect to the sizes of companies, which can be measured by sales, total assets, or the total number of employees. What is more, we also found the power law exponents always deviate from 1. That means large companies naturally have certain advantages, but the widely used financial indicators based on total volume or ratio may not reflect the company’s status well because they are also size-dependent. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new set of evaluation indices based on the deviations of the macroscopic variables from the scaling law to eliminate the size-dependent effect. We found that the indicators based on deviations can give more reasonable evaluations for companies and can outperform other conventional indicators to predict the financial distress of companies.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287105 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 87105&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0287105

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287105

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().