Default Predictors in Retail Credit Scoring: Evidence from Czech Banking Data

Credit to the private sector has risen rapidly in European emerging markets but its risk evaluation has been largely neglected. Using retail-loan banking data from the Czech Republic we construct two credit risk models based on logistic regression and Classification and Regression Trees. Both methods are comparably efficient and detect similar financial and socio-economic variables as the key determinants of default behavior. We also construct a model without the most important financial variable (amount of resources) that performs very well. This way we confirm significance of socio-demographic variables and link our results with specific issues characteristic to new EU members.