Determinants of the Bankruptcy Risk of Commercial Banks in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The collapse of Lehman Brothers, known as the beginning of the global financial crisis, showed how important risk management is in a bank. The aim of the article is to analyze bankruptcy risk factors of commercial banks from CEE. The hypothesis assumes that bank's features: profitability, asset quality, size, credit risk, structure of assets, the direction of the core business and sources of financing, have a statistically significant impact on the bankruptcy. To verify the hypothesis, an econometric model was built which examined the determinants in three areas: comprehensively, dividing into large and small banks and by the EU membership criterion. The analysis showed that the risk of bankruptcy is affected by: profitability, asset quality, bank size, asset structure and core business direction; the determinants of bankruptcy vary depending on the size of the bank; the country's membership in the EU does not affect the type of determinants but only the strength of their influence.(original abstract)