Cindy Yoshiko Shirata

Cindy Yoshiko Shirata is a Japanese accounting scholar known for her work on corporate bankruptcy prediction. She is Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo International University and Visiting Professor of Accounting at Toyo University.

She is best known for the SAF2002 bankruptcy prediction model — SAF stands for Simple Analysis of Failure — built by analysing the financial data of 1,436 bankrupt and 3,434 non-bankrupt companies drawn by systematic sampling from 107,034 firms, using decision-tree (CART) methods on Japanese companies that failed between 1992 and 2001. The model has been adopted by major Japanese banks and rating agencies.

She earned her MBA (1994) and DBA (1999) from the University of Tsukuba, and has held professorships at Nihon University, the Shibaura Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba Tokyo Campus, with visiting positions at LMU Munich and the University of Sheffield. She has over twenty-five years of experience as an accounting educator and adviser and has led work on gender diversity in academia and corporate governance.