This essay summarizes four papers: “Bargaining Around Bankruptcy: Small Business Distress and State Law,” 38 Journal of … Legal Studies 255 (2009); “Bankruptcy's Rarity: An Essay on Small Business Bankruptcy in the United States,” 5 European … Company & Financial Law Review 172 (2008); “Small Business Bankruptcy and the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act of …

. In this paper, we undertake a detailed examination of bankruptcy court opinions involving valuation disputes. Our paper …

, or preempted by restructuring, which is impeded by a collective action problem. We find that bankruptcy and restructuring … are complements, not substitutes: Reducing bankruptcy costs facilitates restructuring, rather than crowding it out. And so …We develop a model of a firm in financial distress. Distress can be mitigated by filing for bankruptcy, which is costly …

This essay surveys important contributions to the economics of bankruptcy. It is an introductory chapter for a …

Lehman's bankruptcy has triggered calls for new approaches to rescuing systemically important institutions. This essay … assesses and confirms the need for a new approach. It identifies the inadequacies of the Bankruptcy Code and advocates an …

This paper assesses the importance of adverse health shocks as triggers of bankruptcy filings. We view car crashes as a … bankruptcy case files. We report two findings: (i) there is a strong positive correlation between an individual's pre … accounting for this simultaneity, we are unable to identify a causal effect of health shocks on bankruptcy filing rates. These …

Policymakers have minimized the role of bankruptcy law in mitigating the financial fallout from COVID-19. Scholars too … are unsure about the merits of bankruptcy, especially Chapter 11, in resolving business distress. We argue that Chapter 11 …, however, bankruptcy should serve as a backstop to other policies, such as the CARES Act. Consumer bankruptcy law's primary …

African American bankruptcy filers are more likely to select Chapter 13 than other debtors, who opt instead for Chapter … 7, which has higher success rates and lower attorney fees. Prior scholarship blames racial discrimination by bankruptcy … bankruptcy reflect racial disparities in commuting …

guard against favoritism (actual or perceived) toward particular parties or types of cases. In bankruptcy courts, cases are … compliance with the law. We study three major bankruptcy jurisdictions (covering Chicago, Los Angeles, and parts of New York) and … most burdened by trustee-shopping by bankruptcy attorneys. We conclude by presenting evidence that trustee-shopping is less …

Recent decades have seen substantial expansion in exemptions from the Bankruptcy Code's normal operation for repurchase … agreements. These repos, which are equivalent to very short-term (often one-day) secured loans, are exempt from core bankruptcy … against eve-of-bankruptcy preferential payment to favored creditors over other creditors. While these exemptions can be …