Insolvency prediction is an important issue for the banking sector and, for this reason, has been studied by many researchers. Aiming to corroborate these studies, this paper evaluates the financial profile of the agricultural credit cooperatives in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, between 1998 and 2001, trying to verify if the changes that affected the banking sector in Brazil after the Real plan in 1994 had also affected the analyzed cooperatives. The proportional hazard model of Cox (Cox, 1972) was applied to evaluate the insolvency risk. The definition of insolvency adopted is associated to the failure of the cooperative, negative equity and/or 40% of negative final results. The estimates indicate that the most important indicators to evaluate the relative risk of insolvency were the "general liquidity", "short-term liquidity" and "personnel fees". Only 1 cooperative, between the 107 analyzed, was in the insolvency risk range determined by the model.
Insolvency; Cox's proportional hazard model; credit cooperatives
