Bankruptcy ideas from the 1990s

During the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to read (and in some cases re-read) the large stream of literature about bankruptcy that emerged in the United States in the early 1990s. (That is one of the benefits of taking a serious vacation). There are a lot of original ideas in this literature because a serious application of the law and economics paradigm to this field probably began around this time. As Aghion, Hart and Moore wrote, prior to the 1990s, “economic analysis – which has been applied with such great success to other aspects of law in the last thirty years – has, with a few notable exceptions, not been used to shed light on optimal bankruptcy procedure”. The radical thinking in the 1990s literature can probably be attributed to the backlash against corporate abuses during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s in the United States somehow managed to provoke a greater outrage against financial fraud than the much bigger global financial crisis of the last decade.

Probably the best compilation of the 1990s bankruptcy literature is the proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Conference on Bankruptcy and Insolvency Theory of 1994 published in the Washington University Law Review. This features provocative articles like Adler’s “A World Without Debt” and Heidt’s article that begins with the line “The Bankruptcy Code is fifteen years old and fourteen years out of date”. Above all, there is the famous paper by Aghion-Hart-Moore describing one of the most radical bankruptcy procedures ever proposed – the AHM procedure.

In keeping with the law and economics paradigm, most proposals of that era are based on a greater reliance on contracts and markets rather than on judges, administrators and experts. The complication is that the problem of bankruptcy arises only under imperfect capital markets and there are obvious difficulties in relying too strongly on imperfect capital markets. Yet this 1990s idea underlies a number of the post crisis innovations in reorganization of distressed financial enterprises – contingent equity, contingent convertible bonds (CoCos), and hair cutting of claims against clearing corporations.

My motivation for studying this literature stems from the problem of corporate distress in India today. It is hard to see how India’s zombie companies can be efficiently and speedily resolved without relying much more on markets than on so called experts. That is the subject of a future blog post.

Posted at 7:50 pm IST on Sun, 11 Jun 2017         permanent link

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