This paper presents the results of a financial ratio survey conducted by the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association (NWPCA) in 1997 for the 1996 tax year. Financial information obtained from NWPCA member and nonmember firms was used to construct financial ratios and measures of business performance for the wood pallet industry. Ten ratios common to the NWPCA survey, Robert Morris Asso...

This study sampled companies listed on Taiwan Stock Exchange that examined financial distress between 2003 and 2009. It uses the survival analysis to find the main indicators which can explain the business bankruptcy in Taiwan. This paper uses the Cox Proportional Hazard Model to assess the usefulness of traditional financial ratios and market variables as predictors of the probability of busin...

This paper is concerned with the use of a genetic algorithm to select financial ratios for corporate distress classification models. For this purpose, the fitness value associated to a set of ratios is made to reflect the requirements of maximizing the amount of information available for the model and minimizing the collinearity between the model inputs. A case study involving 60 failed and con...

This study determines whether it is possible to distinguish between conventional and Islamic banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region on the basis of financial characteristics alone. Islamic banks operate under different principles, such as risk sharing and the prohibition of interest, yet both types of banks face similar competitive conditions. The combination of effects makes it unc...

This note reinterprets methods that seek to use the aggregate dividend price ratio to predict aggregate stock market returns; specifically, methods which use information about time-varying changes in the dividend-price ratio process to improve the prediction equation. It argues that the empirical evidence is still too weak to suggest practical usefulness of these estimators. ∗We thank John Coch...

This paper presents a simple, intuitive theory of business risk. The results are used to explain empirical observations of Beaver on the power of various financial ratios to predict failure of firms, and to hypothesize improved predictive ratios for use in selecting attractive risk situations and in determining appropriate risk premiums.

This paper presents a distributional analysis of some financial ratios in the insurance industry. Although previous studies have established a reasonably good understanding of the frequency distributions of financial ratios, to date most of our knowledge has been derived from cross-sectoral studies, or from the manufacturing sector in particular. This paper aims to contribute to the literature ...

INTRODUCTION Financial stress is an important source of distress and is related to poor mental and physical health outcomes. The present study investigated whether tangible social support could buffer the effect of financial stress on psychological and psychosomatic health. METHODS Two separate postal surveys were sent to random samples in five counties in Sweden in 2004 and 2008, with a tota...

In the context of the current financial crisis, when more companies are facing bankruptcy or insolvency, the paper aims to find methods to identify distressed firms by using financial ratios. The study will focus on identifying a group of Romanian listed companies, for which financial data for the year 2008 were available. For each company a set of 14 financial indicators was calculated and the...