Default Risk: An Empirical Analysis on the Automotive Companies

In Italian companies, especially in small and medium enterprises (SME), the management of financial risks, that is considered out of the core business, has not taken yet the role that it should compete in the logic of value creation that a lot of the company’s management argues. Towards risk is witnessing a real cultural rejection, mostly it originated from the widespread belief that its operation is fraught with positive effects only in companies that have particular degrees of complexity, because they are organized in groups or because they operate in markets and different contexts. This was due to an erroneous conception of the value that drives most of the businesses to remain, in fact, and still anchored to traditional forms of management, aimed at maximizing performance accounting. The paper after analyzing the default risk proceeds to calculate the Zeta-score through discriminant analysis of a panel of companies belonging to the automotive sector.