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Full-Text Articles in Law
Examining Success, Jonathan C. Lipson
Examining Success, Jonathan C. Lipson
Jonathan C. Lipson
Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code presumes that managers will remain in possession and control of a corporate debtor. This presents an obvious agency problem: these same managers may have gotten the company into trouble in the first place. The Bankruptcy Code thus includes checks and balances in the reorganization process, one of which is supposed to be an “examiner,” a private individual appointed to investigate and report on the debtor’s collapse.
We study their use in practice. Extending prior research, we find that examiners are exceedingly rare, despite the fact that they should be “mandatory” in large cases ($5 …
Against Regulatory Displacement: An Institutional Analysis Of Financial Crises, Jonathan C. Lipson
Against Regulatory Displacement: An Institutional Analysis Of Financial Crises, Jonathan C. Lipson
Jonathan C. Lipson
This paper uses “institutional analysis”—the study of the relative capacities of markets, courts, and regulators—to make three claims about financial crises.
First, financial crises are increasingly a problem of “regulatory displacement.” Through the ad hoc rescues of 2008 and the Dodd-Frank reforms of 2010, regulators displace market and judicial processes that ordinarily prevent financial distress from becoming financial crises. Because regulators are vulnerable to capture by large financial services firms, however, they cannot address the pathologies that create crises: market concentration and complexity. Indeed, regulators may inadvertently aggravate these conditions through resolution tactics that consolidate firms, and the volume and …
Controlling Creditor Opportunism, Jonathan C. Lipson
Controlling Creditor Opportunism, Jonathan C. Lipson
Jonathan C. Lipson
This paper addresses problems of creditor opportunism. “Distress investors” such as hedge funds, private equity funds, and investment banks are opportunistic when they use debt to obtain control of a financially troubled firm and extract improper gains at the expense of the firm and its other stakeholders. Examples include the mis-use of private information to short-sell a borrower’s securities and creditor self-dealing.
Creditors can act opportunistically because legal doctrines that historically checked such behavior—e.g., “lender liability”—have not kept pace with fundamental changes in the market for control of distressed firms. The recent Dodd-Frank financial reform is not likely to change …
Failure's Futures: Controlling The Market For Information In Corporate Reorganization, Jonathan C. Lipson
Failure's Futures: Controlling The Market For Information In Corporate Reorganization, Jonathan C. Lipson
Jonathan C. Lipson
This Article identifies and explores an important gap in bankruptcy theory and policy, with significant implications for the coming wave of major business failures: How to manage information about financially distressed businesses?
The paper makes three claims. First, Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code plays a unique informational role, as it creates mechanisms to explain a debtor’s failure and to promote reinvestment. Second, the information functions performed by this system face internal and external threats. Internally, bankruptcy reorganization increasingly resembles an unregulated securities market, dominated by sophisticated, wealthy investors whose motives and strategies are often highly opaque. Their …