Do corporate headquarters play a role in mandatory versus voluntary financials distress driven trading suspensions?

Motivated by previous researchers’ conclusion that management of financially distressed firms extends considerable
efforts to avoid exchange delisting and trading suspension, we formulate a methodology to incorporate managerial efforts
and corporate characteristics driving exchange decisions. Employing an ordinal logit model with random unobserved
heterogeneity, we confirm that there exists an implicit managerial influence on exchange rulings; analyzing a
panel of financially distressed firms listed on the Athens stock exchange we establish that management of financially
distressed firms’ acts in a synergistic to shareholders fashion, preferring corporate restructuring (voluntary suspensions)
to staying inactive and the latter to mandatory (involuntary) suspensions. Furthermore, we find that size, fixed
and total asset growth, asset intensity and persistence of financial distress, coupled with the macroeconomic environment,
significantly affect its eventual stock exchange route.