earticle

영어

It is known that there is severe asymmetric information between SMEs and banks, and they have faced lower credit availability and higher average prices of bank loans than large firms. To improve the productivity and efficiency of financial institutions, it is necessary to collect and to share the credit information to reduce the asymmetric information. A number of previous research show that sharing credit information alleviates the information asymmetry, and consequently it can increase productivity of bank with lower loan price and enhanced loan availability. In this study, we empirically test to find out whether the relative payment period, which is a payment period adjusted by a firm’s internal and external factors, improves a default prediction model especially for the SMEs. The relative payment period is estimated by the regression of two accounting payment periods - account payables and receivables converson period - on firm’s size, industry, and increasing rate of sales. Firms with long relative payment period are identfied on the basis of 95% prediction interval of the regression. After that, this information is added to a default prediction model with other financial ratios, and we examine that it could enhance the model. To avoid the influence of outliers, all variables are transformed into a normal score based on the order statistics theory. Our empirical results show that the relative payment period has an additional information power to predict default, and especially, it is more useful information for small-sized firms than lager ones. These results indicate that trade payment information is useful to predict future default of SMEs. This study suggests that it is important to build up infra-structure to share SME’s credit information to improve productivity of financial institutions. Also, the financial supervisory should consider a system to collect and to share actual trade payment information to innovate Korean SMEs financial market.