We examine the impact of the unobservable systematic risk factor on default prediction model performance. We find that including the unobservable systematic risk factor might help improve predictive accuracy, but it might not help improve rank ordering of firms by default risk. Rank ordering is...

Conditional quantile prediction involves estimating/predicting the quantile of a response random variable conditioned on observed covariates. The existing literature assumes the availability of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples of both the covariates and the response...