IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v109y1994i3p625-658..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Anatomy of Financial Distress: An Examination of Junk-Bond Issuers

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Asquith
  • Robert Gertner
  • David Scharfstein

Abstract

This paper analyzes the ways in which financially distressed firms try to avoid bankruptcy through public and private debt restructurings, asset sales, mergers, and capital expenditure reductions. Our main finding is that a firm's debt structure affects the way financially distressed firms restructure. The combination of secured private debt and numerous public debt issues seems to impede out-of-court restructurings and increases the probability of a Chapter 11 filing. In addition, we find that, while asset sales are a way of avoiding Chapter 11, they are limited by industry factors: firms in distressed and highly leveraged industries are less prone to sell assets.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Asquith & Robert Gertner & David Scharfstein, 1994. "Anatomy of Financial Distress: An Examination of Junk-Bond Issuers," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 109(3), pages 625-658.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:109:y:1994:i:3:p:625-658.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2118416
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:109:y:1994:i:3:p:625-658.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.