Faculty and Research

Corporate Restructuring and Business Insolvency: Economic Impact and Best Practices

Stuart C. Gilson is studying how severe financial distress impacts corporate policies and economic resource allocation. He is also studying how managers can best respond to financial distress in order to preserve and grow value. He is undertaking this research through a combination of field research and large-sample analysis. Much of his work focuses on the role of corporate bankruptcy law in the resolution of financial distress. His past research in this area has considered how management tenure and corporate governance are affected in firms that reorganize in Chapter 11. He has also studied what factors help or hinder the restructuring process and the likelihood of a successful reorganization. For example, he has shown that negotiations in Chapter 11 often break down because competing classes of claimholders come to the negotiations with widely divergent (and deliberately biased) estimates of what the firm is worth. In one ongoing project, he is studying how bankruptcy laws differ across a large sample of countries, to determine how (or whether) the characteristics of a country's bankruptcy laws affect managers' willingness to take risks. In another project, he is studying how efficiently priced are the debt and equity claims of firms in Chapter 11, in an attempt to understand how active trading in these claims (which has increased dramatically in recent years) affects the resolution of financial distress.

Role of Information Intermediaries in Financial Markets:: How do Financial Analysts and the News Media Affect Firm Value?

Stuart C. Gilson is studying how information generated by financial analysts and the news media impacts corporate policies and economic resource allocation. He is also interested in understanding how managers can more effectively interact with such information intermediaries to increase their firms' market value. He is undertaking this research through a combination of field research and large-sample analysis. Much of this work examines the role of analysts and the media in the context of corporate restructuring, where firms can be especially difficult to value, and the impact of information intermediaries particularly great. His previous work in this area includes clinical studies of two controversial (but financially solvent) insurance companies whose large holdings of 'junk bonds' attracted biased and unfavorable media coverage, that ultimately drove both companies into bankruptcy. In another clinical study, he showed how biased and inaccurate coverage by financial analysts and the news media greatly complicated the efforts of United Air Lines to drastically cut its labor costs by giving employees company stock. In a large sample study, he found that firms that broke themselves apart through corporate spin-offs atracted wider (and higher quality) analyst coverage. In current on-going work, Gilson is studying a large sample of public companies to determine how newspapers report on corporate earnings announcements, and whether the accuracy and depth of such reporting can be related to certain identifiable characteristics of both the companies and the newspapers that cover them. In another study, he is evaluating the quality and content of the valuation analysis that financial analysts perform on companies that are about to break themselves apart through equity spin-offs.