The purpose of this article is to study accounting valuation practices in French bankruptcies following enactment of the Law of 1838. The research is based on a study of 500 files in the archives of the Paris Court of Commerce. After first presenting the main steps in the bankruptcy proceedings,...

This paper analyzes how bankruptcy litigation affects the value of relationship banking. In our model, bankruptcy courts may make type 1 errors, i.e., they may declare that an insolvent firm is solvent; and they may make type 2 errors, i.e., they may declare that a solvent firm is insolvent. Our...

Bankruptcy implies the involvement of legal procedure and a comprehensive examination of accounting. Yet the legislation, the function and the meaning of accounting have changed over the last centuries. To understand these changes, which have resulted in the judicialisation of procedures and the...

Since the early 1997 paper by La Porta et al., a growing body of research has argued that ‘legal origins’ have a country-specific, time-invariant effect on property rights and economic development. Following the methodology of La Porta et al., an original database of 51 bankruptcy laws has...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model that captures the interaction between a firm’s cash reserves, the risk management policy and the profitability of a non-predictable irreversible investment opportunity. We consider a firm that has assets in place generating a stochastic cash-flow...

Open market share repurchases are strictly regulated to prevent companies from profiting from insider information. We examine compliance with these rules in France, where the mandatory disclosure of share repurchases provides detailed information on repurchases actually undertaken. Using a...

Research on the impact of open market share repurchases has been hindered by the lack of data available on actual share repurchases in many countries, including the US. Using a previously unused database containing detailed information on 36,848 repurchases made by 352 French firms, we show that...