A Survival Approach to Prediction of Default Drivers for Indian Listed Companies

The objective of the research study is to identify the key predictors that can explain default risk for Indian listed companies using survival analysis. The author has applied the semi-parametric Cox proportional hazard model to test the impact of financial ratios, capital market ratios, macro-economic variables, size and age of companies, and the ownership structure of promoters to a dataset of 859 companies panning across 10 sectors. Unlike traditional models on default prediction, survival models focus on “time to default” as the dependent variable. The empirical findings reveal that return on capital employed (ROCE), return on net worth (ROE), interest coverage ratio, exchange rate volatility, GDP growth rate, stock index, promoters holdings % and the percent of shares pledged are all significant predictors of default. Among the market variables, it is seen that beta and the ratio of market value of equity/book value of debt are statistically significant variables in explaining default risk. The empirical findings also generate the hazard ratio for each covariate which examines the predicted change in the hazard for a unit increase in the predictor. The author extends the research by applying the marketbased KMV structural model to obtain continuous observations of default probability and regressing the same against all the covariates (Gupta et al., 2013) [1]. It is observed that the set of significant covariates are almost common to those generated by our survival approach. The study concludes in emphasizing the significance of survival models in default prediction as unlike traditional accounting-based and market-based models, these models assess relationship between survival time and covariates. The application of survival models is strongly recommended for credit risk evaluation and modeling as structuring of loans can be done by lenders by assessing the survival times of different firms across the entire observation period being considered. 1The author is thankful to the editor and referees for their valuable inputs and feedback. How to cite this paper: Gupta, V. (2017) A Survival Approach to Prediction of Default Drivers for Indian Listed Companies. Theoretical Economics Letters, 7, 116-138. https://doi.org/10.4236/tel.2017.72011 Received: November 29, 2016 Accepted: February 1, 2017 Published: February 4, 2017 Copyright © 2017 by author and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access