Statistical Techniques for Bankruptcy Prediction (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, grade: 1,0, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), course: International Business Administration, language: English, abstract: Bankruptcy prediction has become during the past 3 decades a matter of ever rising academic interest and intensive research. This is due to the academic appeal of the problem, combined with its importance in practical applications. The practical
importance of bankruptcy prediction models grew recently even more, with "Basle-II" regulations, which were elaborated by Basle Committee on Banking Supervision to enhance the stability of international financial system. These regulations oblige financial institutions and banks to estimate the probability of default of their obligors.

There exist some fundamental economic theory to base bankruptcy prediction models on, but this typically relies on stock market prices of companies under consideration.
These prices are, however, only available for large public listed companies. Models for private firms are therefore empirical in their nature and have to rely on rigorous statistical analysis of all available information for such firms. In 95% of cases, this
information is limited to accounting information from the financial statements. Large databases of financial statements (e.g. Compustat in the USA) are maintained and often
available for research purposes.

Accounting information is particularly important for bankruptcy prediction models in emerging markets. This is because the capital markets in these countries are often underdeveloped and illiquid and don't deliver sufficient stock market data, even for public/listed companies, for structural models to be applied.

The accounting information is normally summarized in so-called financial ratios. Such ratios (e.g. leverage ratio, calculated as Debt to Total Assets of a company) have a long
tradition in accounting analysis. Many of these ratios are believed to reflect the financial health of a company and to be related to the bankruptcy. However, these beliefs are often very vague (e.g. leverages above 70% might provoke a bankruptcy) and subjective. Quantitative bankruptcy prediction models objectify these beliefs in that they apply statistical techniques to the accounting data. [...]