On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

We investigate how idiosyncratic lender shocks impact corporate investment. Lenders with recent default experience write stricter loan contracts, leading to a reduction in real investment for borrowing firms. The decline in investment is not attributable to loan riskiness, borrower's agency...

In the U.S., individual parties who file for bankruptcy can exempt a certain dollar amount of property from creditor liquidation during the debt settlement process. We examine the effect of changes to these protection laws on bank lending to small businesses. Our results indicate that additional...

We exploit state-level changes in the amount of personal wealth individuals can protect under Chapter 7 to analyze the effect of debtor protection on the financing structure and performance of a representative panel of U.S start-ups. The effect of increasing debtor protection depends on the...

This paper extends what we know about loss given default (LGD) on commercial loans by studying certain types of these loans that have been excluded from previous research but that may be more representative of loans held by small and mid-sized banks. We use a newly available dataset on...

What are the costs of congested court systems? This paper studies the 2005 consumer bankruptcy reform, which caused the largest recorded drop in the caseload of bankruptcy courts in the United States. The reform changed the law for individual debtors but left corporate bankruptcies unaffected....

We analyze the effect of a bankruptcy law according to which some of the borrower's assets are exempt from liquidation in the event of default in the context of a competitive credit market characterized either by moral hazard (MH) or by adverse selection (AS). In particular, we study how the...

In this paper, we ask how firms’ optimal debt structure responds to a change in the bankruptcy regime. While existing work shows that this relationship is dependent on the ex-ante liquidation value of a firm, we demonstrate that the ownership of lenders they are connected to also matters. We...