Structural and Evolutionary Patterns of Companies in a Financial Distress Situation

The present paper studies the evolution of a set of USA firms during the years 1993–2002. The firms that faced a difficult economic and financial situation in 1993 were considered to be in a distress situation. The aim of this study is to explore if the evolution of this situation depends on the initial features of the distress or if it concerns certain firms’ characteristics. If the evolution is independent from the above, the management decisions become crucial in critical times. For the analysis we used a Multidimensional Scaling methodology where the firms are represented in a consensus map according to symptom variables, reaction variables, and recovering variables.