Article Details
  • Published Online:
    July  2025
  • Product Name:
    The IUP Journal of Accounting Research & Audit Practices
  • Product Type:
    Article
  • Product Code:
    IJARAP140725
  • DOI:
    10.71329/IUPJARAP/2025.24.3.287-317
  • Author Name:
    Aniruddha Ghosh, Ruchi Singh and Satish Kumar
  • Availability:
    YES
  • Subject/Domain:
    Finance
  • Download Format:
    PDF
  • Pages:
    287-317
Volume 24, Issue 3, July-September 2025
Predicting Bankruptcy in India’s Construction Sector: Insights from Survival Analysis and Ensemble Techniques
Abstract

The paper analyzes the bankruptcy of listed Indian construction sector companies, applying Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, Log rank test and Cox-regression. Various financial indicators of 226 listed construction companies were analyzed between 2012 and 2021. Significant differences were found in the survival rates of firms of different sizes. Leveraged firms had lesser probabilities of survival than non-leveraged ones. Debt-to-equity ratio, net worth to total debt, and cash flow from operations to total assets were the critical key performance indicators in predicting the risk of bankruptcy. Further, with these variables different ensemble techniques were run, and it was found that random forest (RF) classifier and the accuracy score were the best. The study presents a novel technique, along with other statistical techniques, to find the key variables that influence the survival of a firm.

Introduction

Since the advent of Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI), the country has witnessed a sharp rise in the corporate insolvency resolution process (CIRP) filings, especially in the construction and real estate sector during the period 2017-21 (Quarterly Newsletters IBBI, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).