Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are major contributors to most western economies. They are often supported by government policies, and in the UK the government encourages banks to lend to them. It is generally believed that the credit crunch has had an impact on the performance of...

Traditionally, accept/reject decisions in consumer credit are based on credit scoring models empirically derived for a specific country/portfolio. Yet with the progress in E.U. integration lenders are faced with the necessity to assess the risk of multinational credit applicants which will...

This paper employed sequential minimal optimization (SMO) to develop default prediction model in the US retail market. Principal components analysis is used for variable reduction purposes. Four standard credit scoring techniques-naïve Bayes, logistic regression, recursive partitioning and...

Loss given default modelling has become crucially important for banks due to the requirement that they comply with the Basel Accords and to their internal computations of economic capital. In this paper, support vector regression (SVR) techniques are applied to predict loss given default of...

This paper presents a cross-country comparison of significant predictors of small business failure between Italy and the UK. Financial measures of profitability, leverage, coverage, liquidity, scale and non-financial information are explored, some commonalities and differences are highlighted....

Bankruptcy prediction is a key part in corporate credit risk management. Traditional bankruptcy prediction models employ financial ratios or market prices to predict bankruptcy or financial distress prior to its occurrence. We investigate the predictive accuracy of corporate efficiency measures...