Creditor Conflict and the Efficiency of Corporate Reorganization
by | posted in: Cramdown and Priority | 0

By Mark Jenkins at University of Pennsylvania and David C. Smith at University of Virginia

While a rich set of theories make clear that incentive conflicts between senior and junior claimants in a company’s capital structure may lead to inefficient outcomes, empirical evidence on how often these conflicts do so has been limited. In this paper, we study the incentives of senior claimants to force inefficient liquidations, or liquidations in which a firm’s assets are sold for less than the firm’s value as a going concern. We develop a bargaining model that assumes senior creditors can exert strong control over whether a firm reorganizes or liquidates during the bankruptcy process. The estimable parameters of the model allow us to gauge the efficiency of bankruptcy outcomes using a large sample of U.S. corporate bankruptcy cases over the period 1989 to 2011.

The main result of the paper is an estimate of the value loss that results from inefficient liquidations in bankruptcy. We estimate these losses to be up to 0.28 percent of the going-concern value of the firm, on average, across all bankrupt firms in our sample. As predicted by theory, these losses are realized primarily by firms with asset values that are close to the face value of secured debt. Our estimate of efficiency losses is driven by several auxiliary findings, including estimates of the fraction of firms that are efficiently reorganized, the fraction of firms that are efficiently and inefficiently liquidated, and the average liquidation discount faced by firms in bankruptcy.

The full article can be found here.

The Ownership and Trading of Debt Claims in Chapter 11 Restructurings
by | posted in: Claims Trading | 0

By Victoria Ivashina, Ben Iverson, and David C. Smith

The role that active investors play in Chapter 11 reorganization is hotly debated in bankruptcy circles. In our paper, “The Ownership and Trading of Debt Claims in Chapter 11 Restructurings,” we collect comprehensive data on individual claims for 136 large firms that filed for Chapter 11 protection to empirically test how active investors might influence the bankruptcy process. Our data allows us to observe the identities of over 77,000 claimants and precisely measure both ownership concentration as well as claims trading for these cases.

We find evidence that firms with more concentrated capital structures are more likely to enter bankruptcy with pre-negotiated or pre-packaged bankruptcy plans, suggesting that negotiations are easier when creditors are not dispersed. In addition, even if they do not have a pre-packaged plan, firms with more concentrated ownership tend to exit bankruptcy more quickly and are more likely to emerge from Ch. 11 intact rather than being sold or liquidated piecemeal.

In the second half of the paper, we turn to the question of how claims trading in bankruptcy affects the resolution of the case. We find that trading during bankruptcy tends to concentrate ownership even further, and that the bulk of claims purchasing is done by hedge funds and other active investors. Interestingly, as these active investors enter the capital structure the overall recovery rate for the case tends to decrease, suggesting that perhaps active investors shrink the size of the overall “pie” in their efforts to obtain a larger piece of it.

The full-length article can be found here.