Current bankruptcy legislation in many countries tends to follow the US model of Chapter 11, whereby the courts have the authority to stay the contractual rights of the secured creditors. The alternative approach of freedom of contracting whereby the privately negotiated debt contract defines a...

We apply the old concept of financial repression, originally due to Mckinnon (1973) and Shaw (1973), to the Chinese financial system and argue that it might explain the country's current account surplus. In a two-country model, we show that financial repression in one country (China), modeled as...

We use data on financially distressed Chinese companies in order to study a debt market where property rights are crudely defined and poorly enforced. To help with identification we use an event where a business-friendly province published new guidelines regarding the administration and...

This article presents one of the most comprehensive studies to date to employ filtering techniques to distinguish between routine and “investment spike” financing. This study records marked differences in how publicly traded US firms finance the two types of investments. The funding of...

We study a two-country setting in which leveraged investors generate fire-sale externalities, leading to financial crises and contagion. Governments can affect the incidence of financial crisis and the degree of contagion by injecting public liquidity and, additionally, by segmenting the...