ISO 9001 certification and failure risk: any relationship?

The goal of this paper is to investigate the existence of a possible connection between Quality Management System certifications according to the ISO 9001 standard and the failure risk of a company. A sample of Italian manufacturing companies is studied in the period 2008/2010, characterised by the beginning of a severe economic crisis. The risk of failure of the companies is estimated by synthetising a set of economic/financial indexes extracted from their balance sheet. The obtained index is assumed as the response variable subject to the effects of multiple factors: company size, regional development and certification. Preliminary results show the significance of the analysed factors.