Abstract
Using financial report data of thousands of public-issued companies over three years drawn from the TEJ (Taiwan Economic Journal) database, we develop credit scorecards for business landing based on the estimates of a Logit regression model. This paper emphasizes that the in-depth analysis and transformation of the original data before the estimation as well as testing and validation of the estimated model are much more important in developing credit scorecards than in a typical empirical econometric analysis. In particular, reserving a large percentage of data for the validation purpose is absolutely necessary when developing credit scorecards. Using two additional years of data as the validation sample, we show that our credit scorecards perform much better than the basic credit rating provided by the TEJ in terms of several performance statistics. Before implementing the new Basel Capital Accord at the end of 2006, this paper presents a timely contribution to both the banks which intend to adopt internal rating based approach and the governmental agencies which regulate the banking industry in managing credit risks.