Identifying the Zombie Firms in Indonesia
Part of a Master’s Dissertation | 18 September 2020
Context
Christian gathered a novel dataset of Indonesian zombie firms for his Master’s dissertation.
Role
Christian drew on his ability to exploit the virtual machine the University of Glasgow provided to collect data from Thomson Eikon Datastream. Using its Excel add-in, he extracted firm-level financial datasets of Indonesian public firms from 1997 to 2019.
Leveraging his Python programming knowledge, Christian wrote a script that automatically identified zombie firms based on parameters set by previous empirical research.
Outcome
The University of Glasgow awarded Christian’s dissertation the highest grade for its contribution to the knowledge of Indonesian zombie firms. The resulting dissertation grade awarded Christian a distinction grade for his Master’s degree in financial economics, which allowed him to work as a research assistant after his graduation.
Christian is expanding his Indonesian zombie firm dataset for an upcoming research article about their determinants.