Abstract

The global financial crisis entails a renewed attention from financial institutions, academics, and practitioners to corporate distress analysis and its forecasting. This study aims to propose a model for predicting default risk based on a business failure index using rank transformation. The procedure suggested is able to capture firms’ financial difficulties and forecast bankruptcy through the construction of a failure index based on some relevant financial ratios. By means of the estimation of failure probability, it allows to classify and predict business distress in time to take mitigating action. This procedure is evaluated by some accuracy measures on a sample of Italian manufacturing firms, and is found to be a suitable instrument for preventing financial distress.

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