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...

This paper explores the scope and importance of the distressed debt market and its market participants and summarizes several relevant scholarly publications relating to how both these markets and participants have performed and contributed to the Chapter 11 bankruptcy-reorganization process. We...

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...

Over the last 30 years, the distressed debt market has come a long way and is now a legitimate investment asset class, albeit with periodic dramatic activity. Despite the benign credit cycle in US markets since the last great financial crisis, there are still more than 200 financial institutions...

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...