Failure and Insolvency. A Proposal for Polish Prediction Models

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of mutual use of the insolvency and bankruptcy variable for business failure modelling. The prior Polish literature on insolvency tends to focus on the qualitative research. This research shows how the terms bankruptcy and insolvency modelling on the informal dataset might result in different fits of the models. Models were estimated based on 17,024 firm's yearly observations from the 2004 to 2014 for the Polish financial market. Following prior research, the models were developed with application of the logit regression. The evidence gathered during the study supports the conclusion that the use of the legal definition of insolvency is a weak instrument for bankruptcy modelling.