As large corporations learn to handle the flow of capital and information in a more sophisticated way, they are finding it easier to boost shareholder value by restructuring the capital and assets that make up their businesses. In the past decade, hundreds of corporations have used tracking stocks, equity carve-outs, and spin-offs for this purpose.

AT&T’s 1996 ownership restructuring provides a striking example. Before the company announced that it would spin off Lucent Technologies and NCR, its market value was just $75 billion. Little more than a year later, in January 1998, the separately trading AT&T, Lucent, and NCR had a combined market capitalization of $159 billion.

We wanted to see whether this level of value creation is the exception or the rule. To that end, we studied the performance of the large ownership restructurings — those in which the parent company had revenues upward of $200 million at the time of disaggregation — that have taken place in the United States during the past decade. We found that such restructurings can indeed increase shareholder value if properly carried out.

Our research looked at three ways of restructuring:

• Tracking stocks, also known as letter or targeted stocks, are a...