This document describes the development of a financial health indicator based on companies' financial statements. This indicator is conceived as a weighted combination of variables, which is obtained through a model discriminating between failing firms and non-failing firms. The definition of...

Four new ratios, that capture firms' Stability, Downside Risk and Audit Quality, are significant predictors of financial distress as evidenced by bankruptcy. Moreover, they improve substantially a logit based credit metric when combined with other classic ratios. A credit metric that comprises a...

The business reporting standard XBRL offers the opportunity to easily extract and analyze a sufficient number of monetary items out of single annual reports for statistical analysis purposes. Using XBRL 10-K reports filed with the SEC EDGAR system, we derive first digit distributions for single...