Understanding the leasing decision with the help of a Kohonen map. An empirical study of the Belgian market

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Abstract
Classical models which compare leasing and bank loans stay on the hypothesis that lease and debt are substitutes: a dollar of lease obligation replaces a dollar of debt obligation. The main difficulty to overcome in order to empirically test the complementary hypothesis is the impossibility to define a practical measure of debts capacity. The only way to find some empirical support to one of those hypothesis is to study the financial profile of the lessees. The proposed empirical study, which covers all the 1991 annuals accounts of the Belgian corporations having more than 15 millions BEF of assets (10.133 firms), put into light the existence of subgroups in the lessees population and a clear relationship between the use of leasing and the financial health of the lessee. To obtain these results, we use Kohonen maps as a nonlinear data analysis method which combines a projection task in the sense of the reduction of the number of dimensions and a quantification task (the research of homogeneous subsets of firms). Key features of the Kohonen algorithm are also discussed in regards of the principal components analysis Author(s) Cottrell, M. Univ. de Paris 1, France de Bodt, E. ; Henrion, E.-F.

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