In this paper, we test alternative feature selection methods for bankruptcy prediction and illustrate their superiority versus popular models used in the literature. We test these methods using a comprehensive dataset of more than one million financial statements from privately held Norwegian...

Corporate distress models typically only employ the numerical financial variables in the firms' annual reports. We develop a model that employs the unstructured textual data in the reports as well, namely the auditors' reports and managements' statements. Our model consists of a convolutional...

Despite the number of studies on bankruptcy prediction using financial ratios, very little is known about how external audit information can contribute to anticipating financial distress. A handful of papers have shown that a combination of ratios and audit data is significant for predictive...

The recovery rate on defaulted corporate bonds has a time-varying distribution. We propose machine learning approaches for intertemporal analysis of U.S. corporate bonds' recovery rates with a large number of predictors. The most informative macroeconomic variables are selected from a broad...

We set out in this study to review a vast amount of recent literature on machine learning (ML) approaches to predicting financial distress (FD), including supervised, unsupervised and hybrid supervised-unsupervised learning algorithms. Four supervised ML models including the traditional support...

Banks’ credit scoring models are required by financial authorities to be explainable. This paper proposes an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) model for predicting credit default on a unique dataset of unsecured consumer loans provided by a Norwegian bank. We combined a LightGBM model...

This paper examines the predictive performance of machine learning methods in estimating the illiquidity of U.S. corporate bonds. We compare the predictive performance of machine learning-based estimators (linear regressions, tree-based models, and neural networks) to that of the most commonly...

I employ a variety of machine learning techniques to predict corporate bankruptcies. I compare machine learning techniques' predictions with the ones of reduced-form regressions and structural models. To assess the performances of different models, I compute a range of scores both in-sample and...

This paper shows the evolution of financial distress prediction models of the past four decades. Special attention is paid to linear discriminant analyses, logistic regression analyses and neural networks. Based on accounting data of 50 UK industrial firms, prediction models are estimated using...

Using a comprehensive sample of 2,585 bankruptcies from 1990 to 2019, we benchmark the performance of various machine learning models in predicting financial distress of publicly traded U.S. firms. We find that gradient boosted trees outperform other models in one-year-ahead forecasts. Variable...