Hedge Funds and Chapter 11 JIANG, WEI; LI, KAI; WANG, WEI
The Journal of finance (New York),
April 2012, Volume:
67, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper studies the presence of hedge funds in the Chapter 11 process and their effects on bankruptcy outcomes. Hedge funds strategically choose positions in the capital structure where their ...actions could have a bigger impact on value. Their presence, especially as unsecured creditors, helps balance power between the debtor and secured creditors. Their effect on the debtor manifests in higher probabilities of the latter's loss of exclusive rights to file reorganization plans, CEO turnover, and adoptions of key employee retention plan, while their effect on secured creditors manifests in higher probabilities of emergence and payoffs to junior claims.
In Chrysler's Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a finding that the debtor was losing $100 million per day justified the hurry-up sale of the company to Fiat. The assertion that a firm is a melting ice cube is ...frequently offered, soon after a bankruptcy filing, to justify a quick sale of the firm under § 363(b) of the Bankruptcy Code. This raises a policy question: is this speed and the attendant streamlining of process a bug or feature? Do hurry-up going-concern sales maximize value for the bankruptcy estate, or do they facilitate collusive deals among incumbent managers, senior creditors, and potential purchasers? The answer is a little bit of both. It is crucial to distinguish between sales where the court and parties have good information about the value of the company and the costs of delay, from those in which melting ice cube leverage is used to exploit information asymmetries and to lock in a favored deal. To accomplish this sorting and reduce opportunistic use of transactional leverage, we seek to allocate the increased risks of forgone process to the beneficiaries of the sale rather than to the bankruptcy estate. We propose that a reserve—the Ice Cube Bond—be set aside at the time of sale to preserve any potential disputes about valuation and priority for resolution after the sale has closed. This approach retains expedited § 363 sales as a useful way to quiet title in complex assets and maximize value, while preserving the opportunities for negotiation and adjudication contemplated by the Bankruptcy Code.
We estimate the extent to which legal and administrative fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, we study how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected ...consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates caused a significant short-run increase in consumer bankruptcies in both years, with larger effects in 2008 when the rebates were more generous and more widely distributed. Using hand-collected data from individual bankruptcy petitions, we document that households that filed shortly after receiving their rebate checks had higher average liabilities and liabilities-to-income ratios.
•We propose deep learning models for bankruptcy predictions using textual disclosures.•We compare the average embedding model and the convolutional neural network.•We show that deep learning can ...combine textual and numerical data for prediction.•We use the erasure method to find the important words for bankruptcy prediction.
This study introduces deep learning models for corporate bankruptcy forecasting using textual disclosures. Although textual data are common, it is rarely considered in the financial decision support models. Deep learning uses layers of neural networks to extract features from textual data for prediction. We construct a comprehensive bankruptcy database of 11,827 U.S. public companies and show that deep learning models yield superior prediction performance in forecasting bankruptcy using textual disclosures. When textual data are used in conjunction with traditional accounting-based ratio and market-based variables, deep learning models can further improve the prediction accuracy. We also investigate the effectiveness of two deep learning architectures. Interestingly, our empirical results show that simpler models such as averaging embedding are more effective than convolutional neural networks. Our results provide the first large-sample evidence for the predictive power of textual disclosures.
Bankruptcy rates vary tremendously across states, and it is not obvious why. The number of candidate explanations is large relative to the number of states. To overcome this problem, we use ...zip‐code‐level data to identify the importance of demographic variables using within‐state variation. This preserves state‐level degrees of freedom to identify the impact of state policy variables. Demographics, wage garnishment restrictions, and the fraction of bankruptcies filed under Chapter 13 explain 70 percent of the variation in filing rates across states. Exemption rates, size of public safety nets, and payday loan regulations contribute virtually nothing to the cross‐state variance in filing rates. Our findings suggest that state bankruptcy rates reflect the relative costs of filing for formal bankruptcy versus informal default. States without effective wage garnishment provisions allow easy informal default. Furthermore, repayment plans mandated under Chapter 13 bankruptcy often lead to repeated bankruptcy filings.
Bankruptcy grifters Simon, Lindsey D
The Yale law journal,
02/2022, Volume:
131, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Grifters take advantage of situations, latching on to others for benefits they do not deserve. Bankruptcy has many desirable benefits, especially for mass-tort defendants. Bankruptcy provides a ...centralized proceeding for resolving claims and a forum of last resort for many companies to aggregate and resolve mass-tort liability. For the debtor-defendant, this makes sense. A bankruptcy court's tremendous power represents a well-considered balance between debtors who have a limited amount of money and many claimants seeking payment. But courts have also allowed the Bankruptcy Code's mechanisms to be used by solvent, nondebtor companies and individuals facing mass-litigation exposure. These "bankruptcy grifters" act as parasites, receiving many of the substantive and procedural benefits of a host bankruptcy, but incurring only a fraction of the associated burdens. In exchange for the protections of bankruptcy, a debtor incurs the reputational cost and substantial scrutiny mandated by the bankruptcy process. Bankruptcy grifters do not. This dynamic has become evident in a number of recent, high-profile bankruptcies filed in the wake of pending mass-tort litigation, such as the Purdue Pharma and USA Gymnastics suits. This article is the first to call attention to the growing prevalence of bankruptcy grifters in mass-tort cases. By charting the progression of non-debtor relief from asbestos and product-liability bankruptcies to cases arising out of the opioid epidemic and sex-abuse scandals, this article explains how courts allowed piecemeal expansion to fundamentally change the scope of bankruptcy protections. This article proposes specific procedural and substantive safeguards that would deter bankruptcy-grifter opportunism and increase transparency, thereby protecting victims as well as the bankruptcy process.
Every corporation has an economic and moral responsibility to its stockholders to perform well financially. However, the number of bankruptcies in Slovakia has been growing for several years without ...an apparent macroeconomic cause. To prevent a rapid denigration and to prevent the outflow of foreign capital, various efforts are being zealously implemented. Robust analysis using conventional bankruptcy prediction tools revealed that the existing models are adaptable to local conditions, particularly local legislation. Furthermore, it was confirmed that most of these outdated tools have sufficient capability to warn of impending financial problems several years in advance. A novel bankruptcy prediction tool that outperforms the conventional models was developed. However, it is increasingly challenging to predict bankruptcy risk as corporations have become more global and more complex and as they have developed sophisticated schemes to hide their actual situations under the guise of “optimization” for tax authorities. Nevertheless, scepticism remains because economic engineers have established bankruptcy as a strategy to limit the liability resulting from court-imposed penalties.
We apply prospect theory to explain how personal and corporate bankruptcy laws affect risk perceptions of entrepreneurs at time of entry and therefore their growth ambitions. Previous theories have ...reached ambiguous conclusions as to whether countries with more debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws (i.e. laws that are more forgiving towards debtors in bankruptcy proceedings) are likely to have more entrepreneurs, or whether, creditor-friendly regimes have positive effects on new ventures via enhanced incentives for the supply of credit to entrepreneurs. Responding to this ambiguity, we apply prospect theory to propose that entrepreneurs do not attach the same significance to different elements of bankruptcy codes—and to explain which aspects of debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws matter more to entrepreneurs. Based on this, we derive and confirm hypotheses about the impact of aspects of bankruptcy codes on entrepreneurial activity using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor combined with data on both personal and corporate bankruptcy regulations for 15 developed OECD countries. We use multilevel random coefficient logistic regressions to take account of the hierarchical nature of the data (country and individual levels). Because entrepreneurs and creditors are sensitive to different elements of the codes, there is scope for optimisation of the legal design of bankruptcy law to achieve both an adequate supply of credit and to encourage high-ambition entrepreneurship.
Although Chapter 11 has served as a model for bankruptcy reform around the world, the conventional wisdom has been that it is characterized by a relatively low success rate and endless delay. The ...data from large samples of Chapter 11 cases filed in 1994 and 2002 demonstrate that this characterization is wrong. Nearly all troubled companies choose Chapter 11 over Chapter 7 liquidation, which means that the system serves a critical screening function to eliminate hopeless cases relatively quickly. Almost half the unsuccessful cases were jettisoned within six months and almost eighty percent were gone within a year. The cases that survive the early screening result in confirmed plans of reorganization around seventy percent of the time. The mistaken conventional view has not only skewed the academic debate, but also prompted changes to the statute in 2005 regarding small business reorganizations, changes that may have produced little benefit in reducing delay at the price of blocking many small business reorganizations of a sort that were succeeding prior to the amendments.
We examine chief executive officer (CEO) career and compensation changes for large firms filing for Chapter 11. One-third of the incumbent CEOs maintain executive employment, and these CEOs ...experience a median compensation change of zero. However, incumbent CEOs leaving the executive labor market suffer a compensation loss with a median present value until age 65 of $7 million (five times pre-departure compensation). The likelihood of leaving decreases with profitability and CEO share ownership. Furthermore, creditor control rights during bankruptcy (through debtor-in-possession financing and large trade credits) are associated with CEO career change. Despite large equity losses (median $11 million for incumbents who stay until filing), the median incumbent does not reduce his stock ownership as the firm approaches bankruptcy.
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