Unit: Finance

Contact:

(617) 495-6243

Send Email

Stuart C. Gilson

Steven R. Fenster Professor of Business Administration

Print Entire ProfileMore

Stuart Gilson has been a Professor of Finance at the Harvard Business School since 1991. He is an expert in valuation, corporate finance, and corporate restructuring. He has written on a broad range of topics, including corporate bankruptcy and debt workouts, tracking stock, equity spin-offs, corporate downsizing, bank mergers, and employee buyouts. His current research focuses on techniques for valuing bankrupt and distressed companies, and on strategies for investing in distressed company securities. In previous research he has investigated the determinants of financial leverage and capital structure in highly leveraged or distressed companies. He has also studied how distressed firms hire, fire, and compensate their senior managers and directors.

Gilson's research has been published by leading academic journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, Financial Analysts Journal, Harvard Business Review, and the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. His research has also been cited in a number of national news and business periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Institutional Investor, Business Week, The Economist, and U.S. News and World Report. He has been interviewed about bankruptcy issues by National Public Radio. In 1996 he won the prestigious Graham and Dodd Award for his article "Investing in Distressed Situations: A Market Survey." For each of the last five years he has been named one of the nation's top bankruptcy academics by Turnarounds & Workouts magazine. He is listed in Who's Who in Economics.

Recently a book of his case studies on corporate restructuring was published by John-Wiley & Sons, entitled Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring: Case Studies in Bankruptcies, Buyouts, and Breakups.

Gilson has served as a consultant and taught executive programs for a variety of organizations and companies. He has served as an advisor to the Unsecured Creditors Committee in a large Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, and serves as a testifying expert on corporate finance, bankruptcy, and restructuring matters. He serves on the academic advisory board of The Turnaround Management Association.

Gilson has taught MBA and executive courses in corporate restructuring, corporate finance, financial analysis, mergers and acquisitions, and investment banking. At Harvard he currently teaches the course Creating Value through Corporate Restructuring in the School's MBA program. He also chairs and/or teaches in a number of senior Executive Education programs at Harvard, including Corporate Restructuring, Mergers & Acquisitions, Finance For Senior Executives, and the Advanced Management Program.

Gilson holds a BA in economics from the University of Manitoba, a Master's in Economics from the University of British Columbia, and a Masters of Science and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Rochester. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty he was a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin.

Print Entire ProfileLess
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors
 
 

  1. Research Summary

    Corporate Restructuring and Business Insolvency: Economic Impact and Best Practices

    by Stuart C. Gilson

    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. Finally, he is studying bankrupt firms' increasing use of asset sales (through so-called "Section 363" transactions) to restructure their balance sheets (as opposed to traditional consenual reorganizations under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code).

  2. Research Summary

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

    by Stuart C. Gilson

    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.

Areas of Interest

MORE
Resources
Contact Related Links Resources