Comparison of the results of a data envelopment analysis model and logit model in assessing business financial health

Abstract

This paper focuses on business financial health evaluation with the use of selected mathematical and statistical methods. The issue of financial health assessment and prediction of business failure is a widely discussed topic across various industries in Slovakia and abroad. The aim of this paper was to formulate a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and to verify the estimation accuracy of this model in comparison with the logit model. The research was carried out on a sample of companies operating in the field of heat supply in Slovakia. For this sample of businesses, we selected appropriate financial indicators as determinants of bankruptcy. The indicators were selected using related empirical studies, a univariate logit model, and a correlation matrix. In this paper, we applied two main models: the BCC DEA model, processed in DEAFrontier software; and the logit model, processed in Statistica software. We compared the estimation accuracy of the constructed models using error type I and error type II. The main conclusion of the paper is that the DEA method is a suitable alternative in assessing the financial health of businesses from the analyzed sample. In contrast to the logit model, the results of this method are independent of any assumptions.