Because theory suggests that businesses will wait too long to file voluntarily, current scholarship asks whether bankruptcy should offer larger rewards to managers and shareholders to induce them to file earlier. Although creditors could force firms into bankruptcy sooner by filing involuntary...

Some bankrupt municipalities have proposed plans of reorganization that offer substantially greater recoveries to their active workers and retirees than those offered to other creditors. Because these greater recoveries are not mandated by a priority enjoyed by the active workers and retirees, a...

We ask whether the financial health of the FDIC limits its ability to efficiently resolve failed institutions. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find acquirers experience large and long-lasting abnormal returns around the announcement of a failed bank acquisition when the deposit insurance...

In numerous cases, courts have declined to apply the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods in litigation where the parties have pleaded domestic law, notwithstanding that the underlying contract satisfies criteria necessary for the CISG to serve as governing...

It is generally understood that the CISG is to be interpreted “autonomously” rather than through the lens of domestic law. Autonomous interpretation is required by the mandate of Article 7(1) that tribunals have regard for uniformity in the CISG’s application. There is, however,...

Combining case-level data on all consumer bankruptcies in the last decade with changes in states' homestead exemption levels, we estimate how exemption changes affect the number and composition of bankruptcy filers. When exemptions become more debtor- friendly, there is an immediate and...

Prior literature argues that optimal sanctions are fixed and maximal and that the optimal evidence threshold balances the social costs of wrongful convictions (lost deterrence) and wrongful acquittals (chilling of benign behavior). This chilling argument is an externality argument. If punishment...

Individuals account for more than a quarter of chapter 11 bankruptcy filings, and this share has grown over time. For individuals, chapter 11 is more expensive and complicated than the much more common chapter 13 because the applicable rules are a hybrid of those that apply in chapter 13 and...

This survey of the law and economics of consumer finance discusses economic models of consumer lending, and evaluates the major consumer finance laws in light of them. We focus on usury laws, restrictions on creditor remedies such as the ban on expansive security interests, bankruptcy law,...

The recent explosion in personal bankruptcy filings has motivated research into whether credit markets are being adversely affected by generous legal provisions. Empirically, this question is examined by comparing credit conditions and bankruptcy exemptions across states. We note that the...