We consider the numerical solution of a c-stable linear equation in the tensor product space R n 1 ×· · ·×n d , arising from a discretized elliptic partial differential equation in R d . Utilizing the stability, we produce an equivalent d-stable generalized Stein-like equation, which can be solved iteratively. For large-scale problems defined by sparse and structured matrices, the methods can be modified for further efficiency, producing algorithms of O( ∑ i n i ) + O(n s ) computational complexity, under appropriate assumptions (with n s being the flop count for solving a linear system associated with A i − I n i ). Illustrative numerical examples will be presented. KEYWORDS Cayley transform, elliptic partial differential equation, Kronecker product, large-scale problem, linear equation, Stein equation, Sylvester equationfor a constant c ∈ R d . In many similar applications, A i can be formulated to be c-stable (with eigenvalues in the open left-half plane). We make use of the stability of A i and transform the corresponding LET_d (also described as c-stable) to an equivalent d-stable Stein-like equation with tensor product structure (SET), which are defined by matrices with spectra inside the unit Numer Linear Algebra Appl. 2017;24:e2106.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nla