Publications
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Critical Success Factors for ERP implementations in Belgian SMEs KU Leuven
Purpose. The purpose if this paper is to examine the critical success factors of ERP implementations in Belgian SMEs and to identify those success factors that are specific to an SME environment. Design/methodology/approach. We survey the literature to discover and classify critical success factors, potentially applicable to small and medium-sized enterprises. Through a survey and a multiple case study within 4 Belgian companies, we ...
The effect of the notional interest deduction on the capital structure of Belgian SMEs Ghent University
Employment protection legislation and SME performance University of Antwerp KU Leuven
This article examines the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance. Rather than relying on country-specific proxies for EPL, as is common in the literature, we compute firm-specific measures of a firm's exposure to EPL by using a panel dataset of 13,112 Belgian SMEs for the period between 2000 and 2009. The empirical results show that firms perform better when faced with lower ...
Quantity and quality of information and SME financial structure KU Leuven University of Antwerp
We test whether the amount and/or quality of financial statement information affects the financial structure of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Belgian SMEs are used, because there are important differences in disclosure and audit requirements among them. Consistent with the traditional view that asymmetric or incomplete information restricts access to external funds, our results indicate that both the amount and quality of financial ...
New rules for SME lending in Belgium Ghent University
Last December, Belgium introduced legislation applicable to credit agreements concluded between professional lenders and SME-borrowers. The new legislation seeks (1) to enhance contractual fairness between lenders and borrowing SMEU+2019s and (2) to foster competition on the credit markets by improving pre-contractual transparency. It is expected that the new legislation will have an important impact on financing transactions in Belgium. This ...
Should we be conservative or aggressive? SME managers' responses in a crisis and long-term firm survival University of Antwerp
Past research shows that during a crisis, managers of publicly‐held firms often adopt a ‘conservative’ approach focused on protecting the existing core of their firms by decreasing investments and hoarding precautionary cash. By doing so, managers decrease firms’ short‐term failure rates. However, the literature says little about how managers of private, Small and Medium‐sized Enterprises (SMEs) (should) act during a crisis. To address this ...
Labor Contracts, Wages and SME Failure KU Leuven
Although employment protection and employee remuneration has been shown to affect many aspects of a firm’s performance, evidence of their ability to explain firm failure is very limited.This paper examines the effect of different types of labor contracts and wages on the probability of corporate failure between 2012 and 2019 using a sample of 29,596 Belgian SMEs. Using discrete timehazard regression models, we find that the use of contract types ...
Employment protection and SME capital structure decisions KU Leuven
This study examines the effect of employment protection (EP) on the capital structure of SMEs. We argue that EP is linked to both the level of leverage and leverage adjustments because of its impact on financial distress costs and a firm's operational leverage. Data on employment contract types allow us to compose company specific measures of exposure to EP using a panel data set of 14,858 Belgian SMEs between 2000 and 2012. Our results show ...