Investors are being encouraged after the global crisis to reduce their dependence on the largest credit rating agencies for risk assessments of companies and securities. Comparing risk assessments from different sources rapidly becomes non-trivial when more than three credit rating agencies are...

We compare several models for estimating the default probabilities of Russian banks using national statistics from 1998 to 2011, and find that a binary logit regression with a quasi-panel data structure works best. The results indicate that there is a quadratic U-shaped relationship between a...