The diploma thesis deals with the impacts of economic crisis on Czech companies and corporate financing. In the introduction there is a categorization of Czech corporates according to their economic size. The chapter also describes common features and differences between small and medium enterprises and large corporations. It summarizes the contribution of these companies to GDP and other macroeconomic indicators. Next part deals with the possibilities of corporate financing in Czech Republic, describes main advantages and disadvantages of different corporate financing types. The practical part is devoted to the impacts of current crisis on Czech corporates. It evaluates the implications of the crisis for different corporate financing types. It describes the effects of the crisis from the perspective of financial institutions, lists the steps taken by the State to fight the crisis and suggests possibilities for further development.

As consumer expectations of corporate values and ethics increase, more and more companies are engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. While CSR in general is believed to play a positive role in consumer behavior, the implications of CSR in diverse situations that involve firms has not been studied in great detail. Specifically, little is known about how CSR activities influence consumer judgments in corporate crisis settings such as product-harm and ethical-misdeeds. Thus, in this dissertation, a series of experimental studies uncover the potential role of previous CSR engagement when a company is faced with a corporate crisis, and examine its impact on a consumer’s evaluation of the company. For a systematic and comprehensive understanding of this issue, two types of negative attributes in corporate scandals are distinguished: incompetence versus immorality. The results of the first experimental study suggest that prior CSR initiatives can more effectively protect consumer evaluation of the company when the company is faced with a competence-related negative event than a morality-related negative event. In addition, when the cause of CSR is directly congruent with the issue of the negative event, consumer responses were more negative than when there is no issue congruence between CSR and the negative event. The most interesting aspect is that the issue congruence effects were more negative for an immoral event versus an incompetent event. In other words, when a firm’s moral crisis is associated with a cause in a previously involved CSR initiative, consumers perceive that the firm’s intention of CSR initiative involvement was the least sincere and altruistic. The second study of this dissertation examines how consumer-company identification can protect the company from a corporate crisis in the context of an incompetent versus an immoral crisis situation. The findings of this study reveal that consumers strongly identified with the company perceive the company’s negative information less seriously than weak identifiers with the company regardless of the negative type – incompetence or immorality. Finally, the detailed theoretical and managerial implications of the dissertation and the role of CSR initiatives in crises are discussed. / text

<p>Datum: 2007-06-04</p><p>Nivå: Examensarbete D</p><p>Författare: Richard Caspar, Joakim Lindberg & Philip Savén</p><p>Handledare: Universitetslektor, docent Nils Kinch</p><p>Titel: KRISHANTERING! Frågan är inte om, utan när!</p><p>Problemformulering: I litteraturen finns en mängd olika uppfattningar om hur företag bäst skall hantera en kris. Vad som däremot saknas är ett gemensamt förhållningssätt till hur dessa bör hanteras. Går det att fastställa olika allmänna rekommendationer från fallstudier och litteraturen kring krishantering?</p><p>Syfte: Syftet med arbetet är att jämföra ett antal olika kriser för att se om det går att utforma en generell metod för krishantering inom företag.</p><p>Metod: Metoden som använts är en litteraturstudie där nio fallstudier har granskats för att därefter analyseras</p><p>Slutsatser: Våra slutsatser visar att företag bör försöka förstå sin omvärld, vara effektiva i sin kommunikation, planera för det värsta samt agera rakryggat och ärligt.</p>

Datum: 2007-06-04 Nivå: Examensarbete D Författare: Richard Caspar, Joakim Lindberg &amp; Philip Savén Handledare: Universitetslektor, docent Nils Kinch Titel: KRISHANTERING! Frågan är inte om, utan när! Problemformulering: I litteraturen finns en mängd olika uppfattningar om hur företag bäst skall hantera en kris. Vad som däremot saknas är ett gemensamt förhållningssätt till hur dessa bör hanteras. Går det att fastställa olika allmänna rekommendationer från fallstudier och litteraturen kring krishantering? Syfte: Syftet med arbetet är att jämföra ett antal olika kriser för att se om det går att utforma en generell metod för krishantering inom företag. Metod: Metoden som använts är en litteraturstudie där nio fallstudier har granskats för att därefter analyseras Slutsatser: Våra slutsatser visar att företag bör försöka förstå sin omvärld, vara effektiva i sin kommunikation, planera för det värsta samt agera rakryggat och ärligt.

La dissertazione ha ad oggetto l'influsso creditorio su società di capitali mediato da covenants inseriti all'interno di accordi di soluzione stragiudiziale della crisi d'impresa. Il fenomeno è qualificato come fattispecie di controllo contrattuale creditorio, e approfondito sotto il profilo degli obblighi di comportamento del finanziatore. / The thesis relates to the influence exercised by creditors of a corporate entity, made possible by covenants inside workout agreements. The subject is classified as case of creditor control, in order to determine the duties arising for the financer.

ABSTRACT Eighty per cent of small companies without a comprehensive crisis plan vanish within two years of suffering a major disaster—a remarkable and ominous statistic. Crises are occurring more often in all organizations, and when they occur, they are leaving a wake of financial, operational, and reputational damage. Why this trend, now? There are five important reasons: 1) a more volatile workplace involving financial, legal, or management issues within the organization; 2) an extreme production mentality often obscuring the conditions under which crises might otherwise be recognized, addressed, or mitigated; 3) enhanced technological platforms for information delivery, such as the Internet, generating a revolving information door thus promoting organizational stress and crisis; 4) fast-paced and invasive journalism practices that eliminate invisibility for decisionmaking or reaction; and, 5) lack of strategic planning for crisis. There is an increasing body of evidence suggesting that crises in an organizational environment, whether created by act-of-God or manmade circumstances, have defined and predictable characteristics often relating to communication problems in the discourse community. It is also evident that solutions exist to reduce the incidence and the intensity of crisis within this discourse community. Approaches include organizational vulnerability assessments, messaging strategies, forensic media tactics, and dedicated efforts to build relationships with important stakeholders. Each of these has as its foundation a vigorous strategic communication plan. Crisis plans are necessary in today’s business environment, and effective communication is an essential element of any crisis plan. This dissertation will focus on communication methodology as a means of crisis avoidance and crisis mitigation.

The aim of this master´s thesis is to verify the usability of credibility and bankruptcy models for predicting the bankruptcy of the company and evaluate the financial situation of the company after the reorganization in the conditions of the Czech Republic. The theoretical part of this thesis contains of descriptions corporate crisis and its causes, consequences and individual phases. Next in this part are described models and their method of calculation. In the practical part are presented selected companies on which are applied the models. The companies´ situation has been evaluated several years before and after the declaring bankruptcy and then has been evaluated the ability of the credibility and bankruptcy models to predict the companies´ problems ahead of time. At the end of this thesis are summarized the results from evaluating of these companies by prediction models, the influence of input data on results and the recommendations to include the models in financial management of the company.

This research looks at how corporates manage crisis communication using press releases and social media channels. It aims to find out how the case corporations Nordea and  Samsung executed their crisis communication during the years 2016 and 2017.The dissertation draws upon literature on organizational crisis and reputation. It also reviews how companies could possibly react to a crisis, how press releases are usually formatted, and finishes with utilization of social media during the crises.In 2016, Samsung became the center of a crisis by the exploding “Note7” phones and Nordea was being mentioned in the “Panama Papers” for tax evasion. The data of the crisis cases has been collected using online ethnography and analyzed with the support of interviews with four crisis specialists. The interviewees were asked semi-structure questions in order to analyze the data  from a professional perspective. The dissertation did not only cover the content used, but also studied which channels where used and the timing of the statements.The findings revealed that Samsung took the “Note7” case seriously and had a bigger quantity of crisis messaging than Nordea on the “Panama Papers” case. Based on the messages, Samsung’s crisis communication length was five months and Nordea’s four. Samsung’s crisis communication showed major gaps in their timeframe and Nordea’s was more coherent. Nordea used long press releases with complex language compared to Samsung’s advertisement and international style. Samsung used a lot of infographics in social media compared to Nordea’s factual messages.The dissertation is relevant in regard to previous studies on this subject, which have shown utilization of press releases and social media during a corporation crisis. Therefore, the  dissertation contributes with new empirical understanding.

Corporate crisis events such as cyber attacks, executive scandals, facility accidents, fraud, and product recalls can damage customer trust and firm reputation severely, which may lead to tremendous loss in sales and firm equity value. My research aims to integrate information available on the market to assist firms in tackling crisis events, and to provide insight for better decision making. We first study the impact of crisis events on firm performance. We build a hybrid deep learning model that utilizes information from financial news, social media, and historical stock prices to predict firm stock performance during firm crisis events. We develop new methodologies that can extract, select, and represent useful features from textual data. Our hybrid deep learning model achieves 68.8% prediction accuracy for firm stock movements. Furthermore, we explore the underlying mechanisms behind how stakeholders adopt and propagate event information on social media, as well as how this would impact firm stock movements during such events. We adopt an extended epidemiology model, SEIZ, to simulate the information propagation on social media during a crisis. The SEIZ model classifies people into four states (susceptible, exposed, infected, and skeptical). By modeling the propagation of firm-initiated information and user-initiated information on Twitter, we simulate the dynamic process of Twitter stakeholders transforming from one state to another. Based on the modeling results, we quantitatively measure how stakeholders adopt firm crisis information on Twitter over time. We then empirically evaluate the impact of different information adoption processes on firm stock performance. We observe that investors often react very positively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt the firm-initiated information on Twitter, and negatively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt user-initiated information. Additionally, we try to identify features that can indicate the firm stock movement during corporate events. We adopt Layer-wised Relevance Propagation (LRP) to extract language features that can be the predictive variables for stock surge and stock plunge. Based on our trained hybrid deep learning model, we generate relevance scores for language features in news titles and tweets, which can indicate the amount of contributions these features made to the final predictions of stock surge and plunge. / Doctor of Philosophy / Corporate crisis events such as cyber attacks, executive scandals, facility accidents, fraud, and product recalls can damage customer trust and firm reputation severely, which may lead to tremendous loss in sales and firm equity value. My research aims to integrate information available on the market to assist firms in tackling crisis events and providing insight for better decision making. We first study the impact of crisis events on firm performance. We investigate five types of crisis events for SandP 500 companies, with 14,982 related news titles and 4.3 million relevant tweets. We build an event-driven hybrid deep learning model that utilizes information from financial news, social media, and historical stock prices to predict firm stock performance during firm crisis events. Furthermore, we explore how stakeholders adopt and propagate event information on social media, as well as how this would impact firm stock movements during the events. Social media has become an increasingly important channel for corporate crisis management. However, little is known on how crisis information propagates on social media. We observe that investors often react very positively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt the firm-initiated information on Twitter, and negatively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt user-initiated information. In addition, we find that the language used in the crisis news and social media discussions can have surprising predictive power on the firm stock. Thus, we develop a methodology to identify the importance of text features associated with firm performance during crisis events, such as predictive words or phrases.

Facebook´s importance has grown significantly regarding crisis communication. A deficiency concerning what types of companies has been investigated earlier and how their crisis communication should be carried out on Facebook, has been identified. The aim of this study is to examine the crisis communication of a smaller company on Facebook and explore how this communication has been received by the company’s recipients. We apply an explorative approach on to a case study in order to answer the aim. The posts of the company and the comments of the Facebook users were coded and analyzed to see whether the crisis communication of the company had resulted in a positive, negative or neutral outcome. Based on this study it can be stated that no association between the communication of the company and the reactions of the Facebook users can be identified. This lack of association is due to more contributory factors than the ones investigated in this paper.