The federal government's investment in the American automotive industry in 2008 and 2009 has sparked controversy over the government's role in private enterprise, in general, and the bankruptcy process, in particular. Critics of the reorganizations assert that the bankruptcies threaten to...

This paper examines how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by looking at the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology whereby we compare sales of carmaker Saab with those of a carefully constructed control group of...

We examine the role of government in the labor-creditor relationship using the case of the Chrysler bankruptcy. As a result of the government intervention, firms in more unionized industries experienced lower event-window abnormal bond returns, higher abnormal bond yields, and lower cumulative...

In the past five years, three of the most remarkable bankruptcy cases in American history have come out of Detroit: the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009, and of Detroit itself in 2013. The principal objective of this Article is simply to show that the Grand Bargain at the...

Bankruptcy has long been the standard approach to reorganizing failing corporate entities. In recent years, bailout has appeared as an alternative option, whereby a governmental entity takes charge of the reorganization. At the macro or systemic level, there is a Coase-like invariance...

This Essay, which will appear in Across the Great Divide: New Perspectives on the Financial Crisis, a Brookings Institution and Hoover Institution book, begins with a brief overview of concerns raised by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy about the adequacy of our existing architecture for resolving...

The new Chinese Enterprise Bankruptcy Law 2006 has been written in accordance with the best international practice. We would therefore expect to see it being used to resolve most cases of corporate financial distress. However, the law is only rarely used in practice which prompts search for...

In this paper, we assess the optimality of bankruptcies among hospitals in the Netherlands. Following the standard principles of bankruptcy theory, there is no strong case for governments to support hospitals that are in financial distress. Such intervention reduces hospitals' incentives to...

To measure economic growth or recovery, one traditionally looks to metrics such as the unemployment rate and the growth in GDP. And in terms of figuring out institutional policies that will stimulate economic growth, the focus most often is on policies that encourage investment, entrepreneurial...