By Samuel Antill (Stanford Graduate School of Business)

In Chapter 11 bankruptcies, a court-supervised negotiation among creditors leads to one of two possible forms of exit, liquidation or emergence. In a liquidation, the bankrupt firm’s assets are sold (piecemeal or in a going-concern sale). Alternatively, if creditors agree to restructure the firm’s liabilities, the firm emerges and continues operating. I estimate a structural model of the choice between emergence and liquidation. In my sample of large-firm bankruptcies, I estimate that creditor recovery was substantially reduced by inefficient decisions to liquidate.

According to the “creditor’s bargain” theory of bankruptcy, the efficient form of exit (liquidation or emergence) from Chapter 11 is that which optimizes total expected creditor recovery. Beyond the importance to creditor recovery, an efficient approach to choosing between liquidation and emergence benefits pre-bankruptcy equity holders through lower costs of credit. The efficient form of exit from bankruptcy should be achieved, under the conditions of the Coase Theorem, by the bargaining among creditors that Chapter 11 is supposed to promote. Without this bargaining, potential coordination failures arise when each creditor pursues the form of exit that maximizes its own payoff.

In contrast to the view that Coasian bargaining in Chapter 11 successfully preserves viable firms, I estimate that inefficient decisions to liquidate are frequent. However, very few of the firms in my sample were inefficiently selected to emerge. I provide an explanation for this asymmetry. Exiting Chapter 11 through a confirmed plan of reorganization requires creditor consent under established voting rules. In contrast, Section 363(b) of the bankruptcy code allows managers to sell assets, or entire firms, without creditor approval. This procedure circumvents the bargaining among creditors that Chapter 11 supposedly promotes. I show that inefficient liquidations are concentrated in cases involving “363 sales.” This statistical association suggests that Section 363(b) enables the sort of coordination failure that Chapter 11 was designed to prevent. For example, these results are consistent with a view that managers may be inefficiently liquidating firms in order to benefit senior lenders or to obtain a job for themselves at a purchasing company.

Finally, I find that inefficient liquidations are largely avoidable. Using my estimated model, I consider the following counterfactual: how would expected creditor recovery change if form-of-exit decisions had been made by a statistical model? In this counterfactual scenario, the courts would hire a statistician to compare the expected potential recovery rates implied by my fitted model and recommend either liquidation or emergence. Each recommendation depends only on data available at the start of a given bankruptcy. I find that such a court statistician could dramatically improve average recovery.

The full article is available here.