Gender Gap in Debt Renegotiation
Paulo Manoel & Vinicius Brunassi Silva
What the paper says
We study the role of gender in corporate debt renegotiation. Using in-court reorganizations from Brazil, we find that male-led creditors are more likely to reject plans put forward by female-led debtors. Although we cannot definitively identify the underlying mechanism driving this pattern, our findings align more consistently with gender-based discrimination compared with alternative explanations. This behavior may be costly: Female-led debtors deliver higher recoveries under reorganization than under liquidation, implying that rejections potentially create deadweight losses. Supporting a miscalibrated-beliefs explanation, we observe that the gender-based rejection gap narrows when male creditors have prior exposure to successful female-led businesses, pointing to a potential path for mitigation. This paper was accepted by Bo Becker, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05802 .
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.