The goal of this paper is to analyze the role that non-financial variables can play in assessing Smes creditworthiness and to compare their value in predicting business failure with the one of the most commonly used financial ratios. We investigate the importance for banks in modeling credit...

We propose a relatively simple, accurate and flexible approach to forecasting the distribution of defaulted debt recovery outcomes. Our approach is based on mixtures of Gaussian distributions, explicitly conditioned on borrower characteristics, debt instrument characteristics and credit...

This paper analyzes the methods of rating attribution of the major international agencies (Moody’s, Fitch and Standard & Poor’s) between 2005 and 2010 for a sample of Italian and European listed banks and tests empirically, through the multivariate analysis of Ols, the possible relations of...

This impressive Handbook presents the quantitative techniques that are commonly employed in empirical finance research together with real-world, state-of-the-art research examples.

In 2010, the world’s focus on the global financial crisis shiftedfrom financial markets and institutions to sovereign debt, especially inEurope. This has motivated a re-examination of techniques andtraditional indicators to assess the health of individual countries.Since the potential...

Surveys on the use of agency credit ratings reveal that most investors believe that rating agencies are relatively slow in adjusting their ratings. (...)

The year 2002 was remarkably difficult on many fronts for most financial markets. For the high yield bond market, it was again a year of record amounts of defaults which contributed to low recovery rates and slightly negative absolute returns. (...)

In recent years, credit risk has played a key role in risk management issues. Practitioners, academics and regulators have been fully involved in the process of developing, studying and analyzing credit risk models in order to find the elements which characterize a sound risk management system.(...)