Credit risk assessment: Evidence from banking industry

Measuring different risk factors such as credit risk in banking industry has been an interesting area of studies. The artificial neural network is a nonparametric method developed to succeed for measuring credit risk and this method is applied to measure the credit risk. This research’s neural network follows back propagation paradigm, which enables it to use historical data for predicting future values with very good out of sample fitting. Macroeconomic variables including GDP, exchange rate, inflation rate, stock price index, and M2 are used to forecast credit risk for two Iranian banks; namely Saderat and Sarmayeh over the period 2007-2011. Research data are being tested for ADF and Causality Granger tests before entering the ANN to achieve the best lag structure for the research model. MSE and R values for the developed ANN in this research respectively are 86×〖10〗^(-4) and 0.9885, respectively. The results showed that ANN was able to predict banks’ credit risk with low error. Sensibility analyses which has accomplished on this research’s ANN corroborates that M2 has the highest effect on the ANN’s credit risk and should be considered as an additional leading indicator by Iran’s banking authorities. These matters confirm validation of macroeconomic notions in Iran’s credit systematic risk