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Full-Text Articles in Law
Breaking Bankruptcy Priority: How Rent-Seeking Upends The Creditors' Bargain, Frederick Tung, Mark J. Roe
Breaking Bankruptcy Priority: How Rent-Seeking Upends The Creditors' Bargain, Frederick Tung, Mark J. Roe
Faculty Scholarship
Bankruptcy reallocates value in a faltering firm. The bankruptcy apparatus eliminates some claims and alters others, leaving a reduced set of claims to match the firm’s diminished capacity to pay. This restructuring is done according to statutory and agreed-to contractual priorities, so that lower-ranking claims are eliminated first and higher ranking ones are preserved to the extent possible. Bankruptcy scholarship has long conceptualized this reallocation as a hypothetical bargain among creditors: creditors agree in advance that if the firm falters, value will be reallocated according to a fixed set of predetermined rules and contracts. In any given reorganization case, creditors …
Health And Financial Fragility: Evidence From Car Crashes And Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Arpit Gupta, Lenora M. Olson, Lawrence Cook, Heather Keenan
Health And Financial Fragility: Evidence From Car Crashes And Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Arpit Gupta, Lenora M. Olson, Lawrence Cook, Heather Keenan
Faculty Scholarship
This paper assesses the importance of adverse health shocks as triggers of bankruptcy filings. We view car crashes as a proxy for health shocks and draw on a large sample of police crash reports linked to hospital admission records and bankruptcy case files. We report two findings: (i) there is a strong positive correlation between an individual's pre-shock financial condition and his or her likelihood of suffering a health shock, an example of behavioral consistency; and (ii) after accounting for this simultaneity, we are unable to identify a causal effect of health shocks on bankruptcy filing rates. These findings emphasize …
Economics Of Bankruptcy – Introduction, Edward R. Morrison
Economics Of Bankruptcy – Introduction, Edward R. Morrison
Faculty Scholarship
This essay surveys important contributions to the economics of bankruptcy. It is an introductory chapter for a forthcoming volume (from Edward Elgar Press) that compiles the work of legal scholars as well as economists working in the field of corporate finance. The essay begins with the foundational theories of Baird, Jackson, and Rea and then collects scholarly work extending, testing, or revising those theories. At various points I identify questions that merit further study, particularly empirical testing.
Ring-Fencing, Steven L. Schwarcz
Ring-Fencing, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
“Ring-fencing” is often touted as a regulatory solution to problems in banking, finance, public utilities, and insurance. However, both the precise meaning of ring-fencing, as well as the nature of the problems that ring-fencing regulation purports to solve, are ill defined. This article examines the functions and conceptual foundations of ring-fencing. In a regulatory context, the term can best be understood as legally deconstructing a firm in order to more optimally reallocate and reduce risk. So utilized, ring-fencing can help to protect public-benefit activities performed by private-sector firms, as well as to mitigate systemic risk and the too-big-to-fail problem inherent …