Survival prediction of distressed firms: evidence from the Chinese special treatment firms.

In the Chinese stock market, firms experiencing financial distress have been imposed on a Special Treatment (ST) cap by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Using a sample of 441 ST firms tracked from 1998 to 2011, this paper employs a Cox proportional hazards model to predict turnaround probability for a distressed firm to remove the ST cap. The predictor variables incorporate (1) accounting-driven ratios, (2) market-driven variables, and (3) information on ownership structure and restructuring status throughout the process. In contrast to previous distress studies, this paper finds that market variables do not add predictive power to the model when combined with accounting variables. Also, incorporating the time effect, the results show that the survivor function for an ST firm's survival is negatively related to the duration, and that the Cox hazards model outperforms the logit model in the out-of-sample forecast. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]