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An anatomy of U.S. personal bankruptcy under Chapter 13
We build a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy that captures salient features of personal bankruptcy under Chapter 13. We estimate our model using a novel data set that we construct from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware in 2001 and 2002. Our estimation results highlight the importance of debtor?s choice of repayment plan length for Chapter 13 outcomes under the restrictions imposed by the bankruptcy law. We use the estimated model to conduct policy experiments to evaluate the impact of more stringent provisions of Chapter 13 that impose additional restrictions on the length ...
Working Paper
The Bank as Grim Reaper : Debt Composition and Bankruptcy Thresholds
We offer a model and evidence that private debtholders play a key role in setting the endogenous asset value threshold below which corporations declare bankruptcy. The model, in the spirit of Black and Cox (1976), implies that the recovery rate at emergence from bankruptcy on all of the firm's debt taken together is increasing in the pre-bankruptcy share of private debt in all debt. Empirical evidence supports this and other implications of the model. Indeed, debt composition has a more economically material empirical influence on recovery than all other variables we try taken together.