Refer to the Financial Management (Spring 1995) study of prepackaged bankruptcy filings, Exercise 2.24

(p. 49).

Recall that each of 49 firms that negotiated a reorganization plan with its creditors prior to filing for bankruptcy was classified in one of three categories: joint exchange offer with prepack, prepack solicitation only.

and no pre-filing vote held. An SPSS printout of descriptive statistics for the length of time in bankruptcy (months), by category, is shown below.

a. Locate the measures of central tendency on the printout and interpret their values.

b. Is it reasonable to use a single number (e.g., mean or median) to describe the center of the time-in-bankruptcy distributions? Or should three "centers" be calculated, one for each of the three categories of prepack firms? Explain.