The European Commission published a draft Directive in November 2016, with the aim of ensuring that all Member States have in place an effective mechanism for dealing with viable, but financially distressed, businesses. The draft Directive includes provisions designed to encourage financing for...

Because theory suggests that businesses will wait too long to file voluntarily, current scholarship asks whether bankruptcy should offer larger rewards to managers and shareholders to induce them to file earlier. Although creditors could force firms into bankruptcy sooner by filing involuntary...

The modernization of Italy's insolvency framework has been the subject of much interest in recent years, related not least to its role in potentially facilitating an efficient allocation of resources. A unique feature of Italy's insolvency framework is a special regime for large enterprises...

In this brief essay, to be included in a book celebrating the work of Jay Westbrook, I begin by surveying Jay's wide-ranging contributions to bankruptcy scholarship. Jay's functional analysis has had a profound effect on scholars' understanding of key issues in domestic bankruptcy law, and Jay...

Prior scholarship points to valuation disputes and valuation error as key drivers of Chapter 11 outcomes. Avoiding valuation disputes and errors is also the underlying driver of most proposed reforms, from Baird's auctions to Bebchuk's options. In this paper, we undertake a detailed examination...

This paper investigates the consequences of liquidation and reorganization on the allocation and subsequent utilization of assets in bankruptcy. Using the random assignment of judges to bankruptcy cases as a natural experiment that forces some firms into liquidation, we find that the long-run...

Two events are currently changing the landscape for business restructurings in the European Union: the “Restructuring Recommendation” (RR) of the European Commission, issued in 2014, and the 2015 recast of the European Insolvency Regulation (EIR). In this paper, we critically review the RR...

We develop a model of a firm in financial distress. Distress can be mitigated by filing for bankruptcy, which is costly, or preempted by restructuring, which is impeded by a collective action problem. We find that bankruptcy and restructuring are complements, not substitutes: Reducing bankruptcy...