This study aimed at estimating the insolvency probability for Credit Unions from the State of Minas Gerais, conditioned on the Pearls system financial ratios which is recommended by the World Council of Credit Unions, a system whose main objective is to enable performance monitoring of individual credit cooperatives, helping their managers to find solutions to deficiencies of these institutions. In this study, insolvency was classified as the cooperative wich: failed to send statements to the Central Bank of Brazil, had negative equity or negative adjusted net worth, or even if it were classified in the following situations by the Central Bank of Brazil: paralyzed, in liquidation, canceled/closed and in ordinary liquidation. From a database of 9,456 observations collected from a sample of 112 cooperatives affiliated to Sicoob-Crediminas between January 1995 and May 2008, a set of Logit class models were estimated. The results obtained with the best fit allow us to infer that the financial ratios "Allowance for Loan Losses/ Allowances Required for Overdue Loans", "Non-Financial Investments/Total Assets", "Non-Earning Assets/Total Assets", and "Services Income/ Managerial Expenses" were the most relevant in determining the likelihood of insolvency of cooperatives in our sample. These results support the hypothesis that the monitoring of financial accounting ratios of the Pearls system, which has not been the focus of the traditional analysis of balance sheets, is important for determining the probability of insolvency of credit unions, assisting their managers in identifying risk factors, as well as in creating a benchmark for comparing the performance of cooperatives, facilitating the supervision process by regulators. However, expansion of the estimated results for subsequent periods and other credit unions in Brazil must be done carefully, with alternative specifications to be evaluated in order to capture changes in the economic and administrative structure of the cooperatives, which may influence their accounting and financial indicators.
Insolvency; Accounting ratios; Credit unions; Pearls system; Logit
