Distance to Default, Subordinated Debt, and Distress Indicators in the Banking Industry

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the inadequacy of present supervisory arrangements to identify reliable ex-ante indicators of banking distress. For a sample of US bank holding companies, we analyse the extent to which distance to default based on market data can be explained using accounting-based indicators of risk. We show that a larger number of bank fundamentals help predict default for institutions that issue subordinated debt. For banks that issue sub-debt, we find that higher charter values and low bank capitalizations further increase the power of bank fundamentals to predict default risk.