This paper is the first result of a project aiming at understanding the history of bankruptcy law from an empirical economic perspective. By contrast with some proponents of "law and economics" (e.g. La Porta & alii, 1998), we consider that the impact of bankruptcy law on national economic...

This empirical paper investigates the path to bankruptcy for a sample of French firms in default, in particular the decision to file a petition for bankruptcy, the arbitrage between rescuing and liquidation and the effective survival. The procedure is depicted as a sequence of three steps in...

Economic theory conjectures complementarities between the ranking of creditors in formal insolvency proceedings and the use of collateral in bank loan contracts as well as the existence of relational compared to arm’s length lending. In this paper we seek evidence for these hypotheses taking...