Fire Sale Discount: Evidence from the Sale of Minority Equity Stakes

Most of the existing empirical studies estimate the impact of fire sales either without the benefit of market prices from frequent trades, as with aircraft sales, or without observing the prices received by distressed sellers, as with the sales of equity securities by mutual funds facing outflows. We study transactions where the selling firm sells minority equity stakes it holds in publicly-listed third parties. In these transactions, market prices from frequent trades in the shares of those third parties are available and the transaction prices received by the sellers are reported. We estimate the industry-adjusted distressed sale discount based on the four-week window to be about 8-9% while controlling for the firm size and stock liquidity or market-to-book value of equity and past stock returns. This discount magnitude is higher than the 4% estimated for forced sales of stocks by mutual funds without the benefit of transaction prices. The discount we estimate doubles if the stake sold is more than 10% of the firm. Prices recover after the distressed sale.