Global Relation between Financial Distress and Equity Returns

Pengjie Gao, Christopher A. Parsons and Jianfeng Shen ()

The Review of Financial Studies, 2018, vol. 31, issue 1, 239-277

Abstract: This study explores the distress risk anomaly—the tendency for stocks with high credit risk to perform poorly—among 38 countries over two decades. We find a strongly negative relationship between default probabilities and equity returns concentrated among low-capitalization stocks in developed countries in North America and Europe. Although risk-based explanations provide a poor account of these patterns, several pieces of evidence point to a behavioral interpretation, suggesting that stocks of firms in financial distress are temporarily overpriced. Received March 5, 2013; editorial decision December 4, 2016 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhx060 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:31:y:2018:i:1:p:239-277.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().