Government responses to the financial crisis have placed a focus upon corporate governance issues; especially now that government has become a major stakeholder in many UK and other banks that have sought public support. Many have argued that as a significant stakeholder in these companies...

The passage of the Banking Act 2009 (UK) was a major landmark in the development of legal tools for the handling of banks in financial difficulties in the United Kingdom. The Act has emerged from over a year of economic crisis and from politically charged debates and consultations that followed...

This note, on the basis of a review of the current law related to disclosure of acquisition of claims against distressed companies and the proposals for regulation of this area, argues that no new (legislative) regulation is necessary, as the market tends to regulate itself, under the...

The lenders that fund Chapter 11 reorganizations exert significant influence over the bankruptcy process through the contract associated with the debtor-in-possession (“DIP”) loan. In this Article, we study a large sample of DIP loan contracts and document a trend: over the past three...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis the EU bank resolution regime went through fundamental changes that seek to preserve financial stability and ensure continuity of critical functions. The same cannot be said of insolvency rules applicable to non-financial enterprises. Unlike bank...

Claims trading has become a significant and controversial feature of American bankruptcy practice over the past thirty years. This Report chronicles the rise of claims trading in the second decade of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 and analyzes the various policy concerns it raises. Most...

This paper studies the spread of losses and defaults in financial networks with two interrelated features: collateral requirements and alternative contract termination rules, which control access to collateral. When collateral is committed to a firm's counter-parties, a solvent firm may default...

The U.S. Chapter 7 bankruptcy system relies on private trustees to administer liquidations. By law, creditors pay trustees a substantial commission on asset sales. I exploit kinks in the commission function to estimate a structural model of moral hazard by trustees. While reducing commissions...

New forms of stockholder activism call into question longstanding assumptions underpinning our system of corporate governance. Scholarship has largely failed to explain the basis for these new forms and, in particular, the differences among activists. Activists are not one undifferentiated mass....

Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...