A "wreckers theory" of financial distress

Ulf von Kalckreuth

No 2005,40, Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies from Deutsche Bundesbank

Abstract: In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that negative excess returns are the equilibrium outcome when a subset of participants is able to draw returns "in kind" from distressed companies. For firms close to bankruptcy, non-cash returns to ownership will be the dominant form of return to equity. If markets expect a contest for control, these returns will show up in stock valuation. The governance problem described here creates a link between the financial position of a firm and real allocation that may amplify macroeconomic real or financial shocks.

Keywords: stock market anomalies; default risk; private benefits; moral hazard; limited liability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 G14 G33 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fin, nep-fmk and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/19625/1/200540dkp.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:bubdp1:4234

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies from Deutsche Bundesbank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().