How efficient is corporate bankruptcy in the U.S.? Two frictions, asymmetric information and conflicts of interest among creditors, can cause several inefficiencies: excess liquidation, excess continuation, and excess delay. We find that the bankruptcy process is quite inefficient, mainly due to...

This paper provides new evidence on the roles and strategies adopted by different types of debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders: “loan-to-loan” (LTL) lenders — prepetition secured bank lenders providing DIP financing, and “loan-to-own” (LTO) lenders — activist investors (i.e., hedge...

This paper develops and estimates an instrumental variables strategy for identifying the causal effect of securitization on the incidence of mortgage modification and foreclosure based on the early payment default analysis performed by Piskorski, Seru, and Vig (2010). Estimation results show...

The authors exploit new data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to provide a more systematic and detailed analysis of household-level employment, income, and expense shocks to mortgage default decisions than has been possible before. These new data provide very different answers...