Predicting Corporate Financial Distress: The Case of Pakistan

In view of corporate lifecycle theory, financial distress is one of the fundamental phase in the life of a firm. Despite being unaffected by Global Financial Crises 2008, that time period proved critical for the corporate sector of Pakistan. This study aims to measures the firm-level financial distress in Pakistan by employing the bankruptcy models of Altman-(1968), Ohlson-(1980), Zmijewski-(1984) and JZ-(2016) for all nonfinancial firms for the years, 2002-2014. The major findings show that Z-score is the best bankruptcy forecast model, followed by Zmijewski model. This study has significance and policy implications as it will help to choose best bankruptcy studies for timely prediction of financial distress leading towards bankruptcy and helps firms to trigger corrective measures thus helping firms from entering into failure.