Modeling the Financial Distress of Microenterprise Start- Ups Using Support Vector Machines: A Case Study

Despite the leading role that micro-entrepreneurship plays in economic development, and the high failure rate of microenterprise start-ups in their early years, very few studies have designed financial distress models to detect the financial problems of micro-entrepreneurs. Moreover, due to a lack o...

Full description

Autores:
Blanco-Oliver, Antonio
Pino-Mejías, Rafael
Lara-Rubio, Juan
Tipo de recurso:
Article of journal
Fecha de publicación:
2014
Institución:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Repositorio:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Idioma:
spa
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.unal.edu.co:unal/65939
Acceso en línea:
https://repositorio.unal.edu.co/handle/unal/65939
http://bdigital.unal.edu.co/66962/
Palabra clave:
3 Ciencias sociales / Social sciences
Financial distress model
microenterprise start-ups
microfinancial institutions
Latin American
non-financial variables
modelo de dificultades financieras
microempresas de nueva creación
instituciones microfinancieras
América Latina
variables no financieras
Modelo de dificuldades financeiras
microempresas de criação recente
micro-instituições financeiras
América Latina
variáveis não financeiras
Rights
openAccess
License
Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional
Description
Summary:Despite the leading role that micro-entrepreneurship plays in economic development, and the high failure rate of microenterprise start-ups in their early years, very few studies have designed financial distress models to detect the financial problems of micro-entrepreneurs. Moreover, due to a lack of research, nothing is known about whether non-financial information and non-parametric statistical techniques improve the predictive capacity of these models. Therefore, this paper provides an innovative financial distress model specifically designed for microenterprise startups via support vector machines (SVMs) that employs financial, non-financial, and macroeconomic variables. Based on a sample of almost 5,500 micro-entrepreneurs from a Peruvian Microfinance Institution (MFI), our findings show that the introduction of non-financial information related to the zone in which the entrepreneurs live and situate their business, the duration of the MFI-entrepre-neur relationship, the number of loans granted by the MFI in the last year, the loan destination, and the opinion of experts on the probability that microenterprise start-ups may experience financial problems, significantly increases the accuracy performance of our financial distress model. Furthermore, the results reveal that the models that use SVMs outperform those which employ traditional logistic regression (LR) analysis.