This paper studies the relation between macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate defaults while conditioning on industry affiliation and an extensive set of firm-specific factors. Using a logit approach on a panel data set for all incorporated Swedish businesses over 1990-2002, we find strong...

We demonstrate improvements in predictive power when introducing spline functions to take account of highly non-linear relationships between firm failure and earnings, leverage, and liquidity in a logistic bankruptcy model. Our results show that modeling excessive non-linearities yields...

The new Basel II regulation contains a number of new regulatory features. Most importantly, internal ratings will be given a central role in the evaluation of the riskiness of bank loans. Another novelty is that retail credit and loans to small and medium-sized enterprises will receive a special...

Counterpart risk rating is at the heart of the banking business. In the new Basel II regulation, internal ratings have been given a central role. Although much research has been done on external ratings, much less is known about banks´ internal ratings. This paper presents new quantitative...