We assess whether two popular accounting-based measures, Altman's (1968) Z-Score and Ohlson's (1980) O-Score, effectively summarize publicly-available information about the probability of bankruptcy. We compare the relative information content of these Scores to a market-based measure of the probability of bankruptcy that we develop based on the Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing model, BSM-Prob. Our tests show that BSM-Prob provides significantly more information than either of the two accounting-based measures. This finding is robust to various modifications of Z-Score and O-Score, including updating the coefficients, making industry adjustments, and decomposing them into their lagged levels and changes. We recommend that researchers use BSM-Prob instead of Z-Score and O-Score in their studies and provide the SAS code to calculate BSM-Prob.
CITATION STYLE
Hillegeist, S. A., Keating, E. K., Cram, D. P., & Lundstedt, K. G. (2004). Assessing the probability of bankruptcy. Review of Accounting Studies, 9(1), 5–34. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:RAST.0000013627.90884.b7
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