Dead firms: causes and effects of cross-border corporate insolvency.

What companies or individuals would share evidence of their mistakes or wrongdoing? Of course, there are posthumous investigations of unethical practices, and the past decade or two have given us many examples of what might happen when companies or executives misbehave: Enron, MCI, Parmalat, and all the banks that thought that the market for sub-prime mortgages was safe promptly come to mind. Also, the now-classic cases of Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol – for an exemplar of how to deal with the major product and brand crisis – or Arthur Andersen, which surrendered its licenses to practice as CPAs after they handled Enron’s auditing, might shed some light and even provide advice for the currently evolving case of Volkswagen’s diesel emissions fraud brought up in the USA. This particular fraud might offer lessons worth studying for years to come. These examples illustrate another bias in the current literature: an almost exclusive focus on North American, or more specifically, US-based, with a few occasional European firms. Again, the disciplinary obsession with theory building and lack of familiarity with business environments beyond a few developed nations is hampering the field’s evolution and potential impact.