A firm's current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in...

Predicting default probabilities is at the core of credit risk management and is becoming more and more important for banks in order to measure their client's degree of risk, and for firms to operate successfully. The SVM with evolutionary feature selection is applied to the CreditReform...