To investigate the additional value of different types of business
credit information, we now gradually extend our analysis, using (i)
a baseline model without business credit information, (ii) the baseline model plus two factors that reflect hard business credit information (payment history and creditworthiness), and (iii) a full
model, which includes the baseline factors, hard business credit
information, and soft business credit information (order book
and business outlook). A comparison of the cases (ii) and (i) informs about the marginal value of hard information and a comparison of the cases (iii) and (ii) informs about the extra marginal
value of soft information. The motivation for this specific order of
gradually adding hard and then soft business credit information
is that hard information is usually easy to collect, almost costless,
easy to store and to assess. Therefore, consistent with wide-spread
practice in the banking and credit rating industry, default prediction models typically first include public hard information and
are then extended by including private hard and private soft information (e.g., Treacy and Carey, 2000; Grunert et al., 2005). Table 5
reports the regression results.