 Balancing Shareholder Value and Financial Stability under a Reduced-Form Liquidation ModelBenjamin Avanzi, Bernard Wong and Jinxia Zhu Abstract: Modern resolution and prudential regimes increasingly wind up a distressed firm not at a single hard threshold but through a graduated, state-dependent process. We study how the design of such a regime shapes the trade-off between shareholder value and financial stability for a firm whose surplus follows a general diffusion. Forced liquidation is modelled in reduced form, arriving at a surplus-dependent hazard rate that rises as the firm's position deteriorates. The framework has three regions: an unregulated region where dividends may be paid, a regulated region where solvency requirements prohibit distributions, and a distress region in which the firm faces the liquidation hazard. To quantify shareholder value we solve the resulting singular stochastic control problem: which is to maximise the expected present value of distributions until liquidation. We establish a verification theorem, prove that a barrier strategy is optimal, and obtain tractable expressions for the value function and the expected survival time, so that alternative designs can be compared at low cost. We show that a distress region placed solely below or solely above the classical ruin threshold does not consistently improve both shareholder value and firm survival, whereas combining the two yields a Pareto improvement. Regulatory design is decisive. Date: 2026-06 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2606.28706 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Papers from arXiv.org |
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