We use a unique dataset of 167 North American and European clusters’ funding structures, obtained from an independent questionnaire survey carried out in the first half of 2016. The aim of this study is to determine possible differences in the proportions of public and private funds in the financing clusters from these two regions. Our results show that there is not a statistically significant difference in public-to-private funding sources among the European vs. American clusters. The proportion of public-to-private sources is on average approximately 43:57 in both regions. However, overall private sources of financing are significantly higher than funds obtained from public sources when we compare average values without respect to geographical regions. Furthermore, using a seemingly unrelated regression model, we identify dominant sources of public funding – in the European clusters dominate European Union budgets (24.29%), and for American clusters, the more prevailing sources are national (26.25%) and local budgets (10%).
To test the usefulness of the Beneish model, we use a unique, not publicly available database from the Financial Administration of the Slovak Republic, aggregating the results of all on-site financial inspections conducted by this authority during 2015 – 2019. This database is paired with firm-level accounting data from the Registry of Financial Statements and the Business Register to obtain additional corporate governance data. Our results indicate that (a) the performance of the Beneish model is inferior for the Slovak data; (b) there are several significant financial variables with statistical and economic significance, but their relevance is conditional on the industry group; and (c) corporate governance indicators appear to be more relevant preventive factors of fraudulent behaviour, especially foreign owner-ship, female CEO and corporate social responsibility.
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