Taking the Twists into Account: Predicting Firm Bankruptcy Risk with Splines of Financial Ratios
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: We demonstrate improvements in predictive power when introducing spline functions to take account of highly nonlinear relationships between firm failure and leverage, earnings, and liquidity in a logistic bankruptcy model. Our results show that modeling excessive nonlinearities yields substantially improved bankruptcy predictions, on the order of 70%–90%, compared with a standard logistic model. The spline model provides several important and surprising insights into nonmonotonic bankruptcy relationships. We find that low-leveraged as well as highly profitable firms are riskier than those given by a standard model, possibly a manifestation of credit rationing and excess cash-flow volatility.
Institutions: Swedish National Bank, Linköping University
Language: English
Subfield: Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3124417017