In 2008 and 2009, bondholders of ailing companies were affected by a reemergenceof an important corporate restructuring strategy, known as a Distressed Exchange.Fourteen companies in 2008 completed this desperate attempt to avoid a formal bankruptcy filing – about twice as many as any single...

Forty years ago, I developed a method of predicting bankruptcies by U.S. [public] companies that makes use of equity market values as well as fundamental financial and operating data. Since that time, my 'Z-Score' model has become one of the most widely used methods for assessing the...

Edward I. Altman is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance, Emeritus at the Stern School of Business, New York University (NYU). He is also director of research in credit and debt markets at NYU's Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions. An internationally recognized expert on...

It is widely believed that the stock-market oriented US financial system forces corporate managers to behave myopically relative to their Japanese counterparts, who operate in a bank-based system. We hypothesize that if US firms are more myopic than Japanese firms, then episodes of financial...

We have often observed, e.g. Altman, Hotchkiss (2006), that the market for investing in distressed securities, (the so-called “vulture” markets), had captured the interest of increasing numbers of investors and analysts. These investors, sometimes categorized as “alternative asset”...

Reviews on financial distress prediction models indicate that these techniques give highly reliable estimates of probabilities of default (PDs) and loss given default (LGD) only for relatively short horizons, rarely beyond two years. Major stakeholders, e.g. investors and bank risk and capital...

The purpose of this paper is firstly to review the literature on the efficacy and importance of the Altman Z-Score bankruptcy prediction model globally and its applications in finance and related areas. This review is based on an analysis of 33 scientific papers published from the year 2000 in...

State guaranty funds are quasi-governmental agencies that provide insurance to policyholders against the risk of insurance company failure. But insurance provided by guaranty funds, like all insurance, creates moral hazard problems, especially for companies that are insolvent or near-insolvent....

Fifty years ago, I published the initial, classic version of the Z-score bankruptcy prediction models. This multivariate statistical model has remained perhaps the most well-known, and more importantly, most used technique for providing an early warning signal of firm financial distress by...

Why is the cost of resolving insurance company failures so high? Evidence in this paper suggests that the state insurance regulatory bodies in charge of the liquidation process turn over an average of only 33 cents for each $1.00 of pre-insolvency assets to the guaranty funds (the state agencies...