Abstract

The Polish economy went through a transition from a centrally-planned economy to capitalism about twenty years ago. Therefore in almost every area of economic science, Polish economists frequently find that theories created for developed countries are not directly applicable under Polish conditions. This statement applies also to the area of bankruptcy prediction. For almost twenty years there have been numerous attempts to construct a Polish model of bankruptcy prediction. The main obstacle in this process is the access to large enough data samples. In this paper we analyze, to the best of our knowledge, the largest database of Polish company bankruptcies. It includes data from 13,288 companies, of which 1,198 went bankrupt. Our intention, using Shumway’s (2001) approach, is to show the aggregated results of fitting many competing bankruptcy model specifications to a large sample of Polish companies. The models are described in terms of their predictive powers, and also the predictors which appeared most often in the set of the best performing models are identified and discussed.

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