Systematizing the Empirical Research on Corporate Distress. What Board Features Affect Survival?

Over the years, understanding the possible antecedents of corporate distress has received considerable interest among the scholars and practitioners of management worldwide. Also, much of the evolving empirical research around this topic has been increasingly devoted to studying what board features can increase or decrease the survival of distressed firms. Although still fragmented, the advancements within this kind of research have demonstrated that particular board features count. Thus, this article aims at providing both the management scholars and practitioners with the systematization of these advancements. The findings from the present review show that board independence tends to prevent distress situations and increase the survival of those firms that initiate their restructuring. The board heterogeneity and low tenure can also count. Finally, it is evidenced that the heterogeneity of the statistical methods employed by the extant literature has increased proportionally with the time and journal ranking of the reviewed publications.