Credit risk and Basel II: are nonprofit firms financially different?

Abstract

We estimate a model of credit risk for portfolios of small and medium-sized enterprises, conditional on being a nonprofit (NP) or for-profit (FP) firms. The estimation is based on a unique data set on Italian firms provided by a large commercial bank. We show that the main variables to identify creditworthiness are different for NP and FP firms. Traditional balance sheet information seems to be less crucial for NP firms.