Corporate Reorganization as Labor Insurance in Bankruptcy
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Reorganization | 0

By Diana Bonfim (Banco de Portugal; Catholic University of Portugal – Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics) and Gil Nogueira (Bank of Portugal – Research Department)

Diana Bonfim
Gil Nogueira

How does corporate reorganization affect labor outcomes in bankruptcy? The existing literature argues that corporate reorganization affects the reallocation of labor because it retains workers in bankrupt firms. In some cases, bankrupt firms remain alive for too long and retain workers inefficiently. In other cases, reorganization reduces the probability of inefficient liquidation.

In this paper we show that resource retention is not the only determinant of labor outcomes in bankruptcy. The decision process in bankruptcy creates a principal-agent problem between firms’ claimholders and other stakeholders (e.g., workers, suppliers). Claimholders decide bankruptcy outcomes but other stakeholders with limited say in the bankruptcy process are also affected by these outcomes. 

Workers are among these stakeholders. They use job contracts with firms as a form of insurance in times of adversity. In the absence of corporate reorganization, workers lose these job contracts and experience persistent costs of job loss. Reorganization improves labor outcomes because it reduces the probability that workers lose the insurance provided by job contracts when the costs of job loss are high.

We test this hypothesis empirically using data from Portuguese reorganization cases. The institutional setting has several features that help design an adequate empirical strategy. First, reorganization cases are randomly allocated across judges. We use this random assignment as a source of variation in the probability of reorganization that is not affected by other factors that also influence workers’ careers. Second, Portuguese firms report financial statements annually, which we use to check whether reorganization affects labor reallocation to more productive or profitable firms. Finally, we link this data to a rich administrative employer-employee matched dataset, which allows us to track workers who eventually change jobs. This dataset is unique because it contains rich job descriptors. We use this data to establish a relationship between corporate reorganization and the scarring effect of bankruptcy on workers’ job functions.

We uncover three main findings. First, we measure the effect of corporate reorganization on the sorting of workers to productive and profitable firms. In five years, only about 20% of the workforce remains in reorganized firms. Many workers from reorganized firms find jobs with new employers. We find no evidence that reorganization affects the reallocation of labor to efficient or profitable firms.

Second, reorganization is an important source of labor insurance against negative productions shocks. In the short term, reorganization increases the probability that workers are employed. In the long term, reorganization increases wages and reduces the scarring effect of job downgrading that is often observed in recessions. Reorganization reduces the probability that workers move to less skill-intensive occupations and increases occupation wage premia. 

Third, we show that reorganization improves job transitions to new employers. Reorganization increases the average time it takes to leave a firm that files for bankruptcy by one year. Reorganization reduces the probability that workers move to low-paying jobs and increases the probability that workers find high-paying jobs with new employers.

Overall, our results show that corporate reorganization is an important source of labor insurance in bankruptcy, thereby mitigating the scarring effect of job loss. The full article is available here.

Teams and Bankruptcy
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance, Jurisprudence, Valuation | 0

Ramin Baghai (Stockholm School of Economics), Rui Silva (London Business School), Luofu Ye (London Business School)

Corporate bankruptcies constitute an important mechanism through which the economy rids itself of obsolete firms and allocates their constituent parts to alternative and potentially more productive uses. This process of reallocation of human and physical capital is an “essential fact about capitalism” (Schumpeter 1942).

While resources may on average be used more productively following a bankruptcy, this process is not deterministic and likely involves various imperfections. In addition to the potential loss in value to the firm’s redeployable physical capital stock (e.g., due to asset fire sales), bankruptcy may involve some deterioration of organizational and human capital. Moreover, frictions in the post-bankruptcy re-allocation of resources across firms may lead capital and labor to be idle for some time or even result in protracted sub-optimal uses. In the case of workers, unemployment spells could also accelerate the depreciation of skills. While prior studies have focused primarily on the reallocation of physical capital and individual workers, we are the first to systematically study how the human capital embedded in teams is affected by corporate bankruptcies.

Teamwork has become a prevalent way of organizing production in science, in patenting, and, more broadly, in the corporate sector. It has been documented, in a variety of settings, that teamwork has substantial benefits compared to work in hierarchical environments, in particular when complex tasks are involved. Despite the importance of teamwork, there is little systematic evidence on the economic drivers affecting the creation, stability, and dissolution of productive team configurations. Understanding these forces is crucial for the design of corporate and public policies that maximize productivity.

In our working paper, we use employer-employee matched data on U.S. inventors to study how the human capital embedded in teams is reallocated in corporate bankruptcies; our data span the period 1980 to 2010. Our results paint a nuanced picture of the reallocation of human capital through bankruptcy. Team dissolution increases around bankruptcy and team inventors subsequently become less productive than their less team-dependent colleagues. However, the labor market and the market for corporate control promote the preservation of team-specific human capital. Therefore, on balance, the productivity losses associated with bankruptcy are modest for team-dependent inventors. In addition, inventors who do not work in teams may even experience an increase in their post-bankruptcy productivity (although these effects have limited statistical significance). This suggests that bankruptcies have the capacity to release resources to more productive uses. Overall, we conclude that frictions that limit the efficiency of asset reallocation through bankruptcy may be limited in the case of highly skilled labor.

The full article is available here.