Information and credit access: using bankruptcy as a signal

Legally, a bankruptcy flag can appear on an individual's credit report for up to 10 years after the filing. The flag affects an individual's credit score, and in turn, an individual's access to credit. In this article, we investigate how the bankruptcy flag affects access to credit along three dimensions–loan acceptance, the price of the loan as is determined by the interest rate, and the amount of credit the household receives. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Survey of Consumer Finances, we estimate a series of two-stage models corrected for sample selection and adjusted to account for the household's level of creditworthiness. We find that the bankruptcy flag increases the probability of being denied access to a loan. The flag also increases interest rates for unsecured loans and lowers the credit limits available to households. The findings have important implications with respect to current bankruptcy code and the impact that information, such as the bankruptcy flag, can have on the efficiency of the credit markets.     

Exclusive contracts and the institution of bankruptcy

Summary. The paper studies the institution of bankruptcy when exclusive contracts cannot be enforced ex ante, e.g., a bank cannot monitor whether the borrower enters into contracts with other creditors. The institution of bankruptcy enables the bank to enforce its claim to any funds that the borrower has above a fixed bankruptcy protection level. Bankruptcy improves on non-exclusive contractual relationships but is not a perfect substitute for exclusivity ex ante. We characterize the effect of bankruptcy provisions on the equilibrium contracts which borrowers use to raise financing.Received: 6 December 2004, Revised: 15 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: D82, G33, K29. Correspondence to: Adriano A. RampiniWe thank the seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern, Pompeu Fabra, Stanford, the CEPR European Summer Symposium in Financial Markets, the NBER Corporate Finance Program Meeting, the SED Annual Meeting, the Texas Finance Festival, the WFA Annual Conference, the Workshop on Information, Financial Markets and the Business Cycle in Rome and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and in particular Marco Bassetto, Alberto Bennardo, Philip Bond, Peter DeMarzo, Andrea Eisfeldt, Michael Fishman, Zsuzsanna Fluck, Denis Gromb, Oliver Hart, Eugene Kandel, John Kareken, Narayana Kocherlakota, Stephan Krasa, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Deborah Lucas, Thomas Noe, Onur Ozgur, Mitchell Petersen, Artur Raviv, Anne Villamil, Jeffrey Zwiebel, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments, and Nisan Langberg for research assistance. Bisin gratefully acknowledges the research support of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-9818844 and the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics.     

Credit limits and bankruptcy

Credit cards offer a limit, rather than a specific loan size, at a pre-approved interest rate. This paper studies the determination of these credit limits jointly with default in the presence of one-period debt. I adapt the standard incomplete markets macroeconomic model of one-period unsecured debt with the optimal choice of credit limit. Endogenous limits and positive default coexist. A numerical exercise illustrates the consequences of various factors for indebtedness, credit limits, and bankruptcy.     

Resistance to technology adoption: The rise and decline of guilds

This paper analyzes the decision of a group of specialized workers to form a guild and block the adoption of a new technology that does not require their specialized input. The theory predicts an inverted-U relation between guilds and market size: for small markets, firm profits are insufficient to cover the fixed cost of adopting the new technology, and hence, specialized workers have no reason to form guilds; for intermediate sized markets, firm profits are large enough to cover the higher fixed costs, but not large enough to defeat workers' resistance, and so workers form guilds and block adoption; and for large markets, these profits are sufficiently large to overcome worker resistance and so guilds disband and the more productive technology diffuses throughout the economy. We show that this inverted-U relation between guilds and market size predicted by our theory exists in a dataset of Italian guilds from the 14th to the 19th century.     

On the investment implications of bankruptcy laws

Axiomatic analysis of bankruptcy problems reveals three major principles: (i) proportionality (PRO), (ii) equal awards (EA), and (iii) equal losses (EL). However, most real life bankruptcy procedures implement only the proportionality principle. We construct a noncooperative investment game to explore whether the explanation lies in the alternative implications of these principles on investment behavior. Our results are as follows (i) EL always induces higher total investment than PRO which in turn induces higher total investment than EA; (ii) PRO always induces higher egalitarian social welfare than both EA and EL in interior equilibria; (iii) PRO induces higher utilitarian social welfare than EL in interior equilibria but its relation to EA depends on the parameter values (however, a numerical analysis shows that on a large part of the parameter space, PRO induces higher utilitarian social welfare than EA).     

Information technology and the spatial dynamics of capital

This paper considers the spatial attributes of computer network technology and their implications for modelling the regional dynamics of the information economy. Attention focuses initially on the assumptions made about the locational and usage characteristics of capital in some traditional regional economic models, and then it is shown that the new information technology, as a form of ‘information capital’, requires closer scrutiny of these approaches. We emphasize the ‘communicability’ of this type of capital, specifically the capital services embodied in information flows over corporate computer networks, and its potential effects on the regional geography of enterprise and of the economy more generally. This leads us to reflect on what new considerations should enter into regional policy-making for the information economy, including the central role of advanced telecommunications infrastructure.     

An agency theory of the bankruptcy law

What is the purpose of bankruptcy law? Existing views focus on the need of coordinating creditors' conflicting claims. In this paper the authors argue that the bankruptcy law helps reduce agency costs in financially distressed firms by forcing managers to disclose information on the viability of the firm. The authors' theory explains a number of empirical observations of financial distress that cannot easily be explained by existing theories of bankruptcy law.     

On the welfare implications of restricting bankruptcy information

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) dictates that adverse events such as a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing must be removed from an individual’s credit record after 10 years. The intent of the law is to provide partial consumption insurance by giving an individual a fresh start. However, the law obviously weakens incentives not to default, which can result in higher interest rates that in turn reduce intertemporal insurance. Because of this tradeoff, it is unclear how long is the optimal length of time that an adverse event remains on an individual’s credit record. In this paper we assess the welfare consequences of varying the length of time that adverse events can be on one’s credit record. We calibrate the model to US data where the exclusion parameter is set to be 10 years on average. Then we run a counterfactual to find the length that maximizes ex-post economywide welfare using a consumption equivalent measure. The model predicts agents prefer to remove the bankruptcy flag after one year, though the gains are small.     

Information technology and efficiency in trucking

Abstract .  We develop an econometric model to estimate the impact of Electronic Vehicle Management Systems ( EVMS ) on the load factor ( LF ) of heavy trucks. This technology is supposed to improve capacity utilization. The model is estimated on the Quebec subsample of the 1999  National Roadside Survey . The  LF  is explained as a function of truck, trip, and carrier characteristics. We show that the use of  EVMS  results in an increase of 16 percentage points of  LF  on backhaul trips. However, we also find that there is a rebound effect on fronthaul movements, with a reduction of  LF  by about 7.6 percentage points.     

Information,innovation and diffusion of technology

The paper presents an infinite horizon model of innovation and diffusion incorporating features from recent advances in evolutionary economics. A stochastic variant is explored which posits that technological knowledge is costly to obtain, requiring resource expenditure. There are heterogeneous agents: optimizing as well as non-optimizing agents. The optimizing agents incur an innovation cost. The return from inventive investment is random. The non-optimizing agents, operating existing technologies, behave solely adaptively. Cross-effects between those two types of agents give rise to the multiple equilibria, path-dependence, diversity of diffusion processes and a coexistence of different technologies. Some policy conclusions are drawn in the last section.     

Duration of bankruptcy proceedings and monetary policy effectiveness

A common assumption in well-known costly-state-verification frameworks is that when a borrower defaults, creditors receive a payoff immediately (after incurring bankruptcy costs). While this assumption enhances tractability, it is unrealistic given the considerable delays in the actual practice of bankruptcy. In this paper, I identify the duration of bankruptcy proceedings as an additional source of friction in financial markets and investigate the relationship between this friction and the effectiveness of monetary policy by using U.S. state-level data. Consistent with the commonly-observed positive relationship between the degree of standard financial frictions and the amplitude of macroeconomic responses, I find that U.S. monetary policy is most effective in states with longer bankruptcy proceedings.     

Systemic financial distress and auction-based bankruptcy reorganization

Most bankruptcy procedures try to reorganize a financially-distressed firm's debts to a serviceable level through negotiations overseen by courts. Markets are an alternative to such negotiations. This paper develops a market-based approach that is appropriate if claimants are severely cash-constrained and there is merit in having existing owners-managers remain in control.This approach was developed in response to the 1997 Asian Crisis, where the sheer numbers of over-indebted firms, creditors with poor incentives, and inexperienced courts stymied negotiated resolution. The scheme, however, can be applied to other crisis settings that exhibit particular characteristics. One such setting could be the resolution of external sovereign debts, a situation where creditors obviously cannot take possession of a country.The scheme arranges creditors in a queue to be serviced in sequence from the firm's operating cash flows. Creditors bid for their position in this queue, and those accepting a greater proportionate reduction in the face value of their claims are placed ahead of the others. Any existing hierarchy of claims is honored by having claimants bid for their positions within the relevant segment of the queue. No one in the queue (including owners who are last) is paid anything until the (reduced) debts of the first in line are fully discharged using the firm's operating cash surpluses. The queue then moves up and the next claimant in line is serviced.The paper shows that, in equilibrium, the aggregate debts of the firm are reduced enough to provide a positive expected residual return to the owner-managers, which improves their incentives to efficiently operate the firm and can result in an outcome that is Pareto superior to other bankruptcy procedures. We discuss the efficiency properties of this scheme and its appropriateness to situations of systemic financial distress.     

Information structure and coordination in technology policy

The main purpose of our paper is to present a model which allows a comparison of different types of technology policies to be made. It appears that there is a kind of model which is appropriate to that purpose but which belongs to the theory of the firm. Indeed, one of the characteristics of technology policies is the degree of centralization of decision; as it is in the design of firm organization. It seems that a model like AOKI's (1986) presents sufficient properties to be used in our context. The aim of this exercise is to compare vertical and horizontal institutional frameworks for technology policies, more precisely diffusion and mission oriented policies. This framework will be applied to the case of some technology policies in the Federal Republic of Germany (before re-unification): programmes in production technologies and the Transrapid programme.Financial support by the E. C. for the SPES-project Comparative Economics of R & D: the case of France and Germany is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank all participants to the SPES-project (involving the Universities of Ausburg and Tübingen, the IFO Institute Munich, the CNRS teams LATAPSES in Nice and BETA in Strasbourg and the Ecole Centrale Paris) for helpful comments. We also profited from comments by A. Arundel, R. Cowan, P. A. David, C. Freeman and L. Soete, and by two anonymous referees. An initial version of this paper is published as Foray and Llerena, 1992.     

Additivity in bankruptcy problems and in allocation problems

We study the property of additivity in bankruptcy problems and in allocation problems. In bankruptcy problems we use this property to characterize the Talmudic rule proposed by Rabbi Ibn Ezra. Moreover we generalize this rule to every bankruptcy problem. Again, using additivity we characterize the rights egalitarian solution in allocation problems.     

Unawareness and bankruptcy: A general equilibrium model

Summary. We present a consistent pure-exchange general equilibrium model where agents may not be able to foresee all possible future contingencies. In this context, even with nominal assets and complete asset markets, an equilibrium may not exist without appropriate assumptions. Specific examples are provided. An existence result is proved under the main assumption that there are sufficiently many states that all the agents foresee. An intrinsic feature of the model is bankruptcy, which agents may involuntarily experience in the unforeseen states. Received: April 23, 1997; revised version: May 19, 1997     

Path modelling to bankruptcy: causes and symptoms of the banking crisis

This article studies the bankruptcy of US banks since 2009. It first analyses the financial symptoms that precede bankruptcy, such as low profitability, insufficient revenue or low solvency ratios. It also goes into the causes of these symptoms. It poses several hypotheses on causes of failure, such as loan growth (some of them risky), specialization (in this case concentration in real estate) and the pursuit of a turnover-driven strategy neglecting margin. It presents and tests a structural equation modelling based on partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM) and logistic regression. Results show that, 5 years before the crisis, failed banks had, compared to solvent banks, the following: higher loan growth, higher concentration on real estate loans, higher risk ratios, higher turnover, but lower margins. A relationship is found between symptoms and causes. Failed banks present a significant relationship between the percentage of real estate loans and risk. This relationship is negative in excellent banks, confirming that they allocated less real estate loans with a high quality. Nonfailed banks compensated increases in risk by strengthening their core capital.     

Game theoretic analysis of a bankruptcy problem from the Talmud

For three different bankruptcy problems, the 2000-year old Babylonian Talmud prescribes solutions that equal precisely the nucleoli of the corresponding coalitional games. A rationale for these solutions that is independent of game theory is given in terms of the Talmudic principle of equal division of the contested amount; this rationale leads to a unique solution for all bankruptcy problems, which always coincides with the nucleolus. Two other rationales for the same rule are suggested, in terms of other Talmudic principles. (Needless to say, the rule in question is not proportional division).     

Information technology investment strategies: a review and synthesis of the literature

In spite of high importance of information technology (IT) investments, managers do not have sufficient guidelines to formulate IT investment strategy of a firm. In this paper, we review the literature to determine the factors that influence the IT investment strategy. The concept of IT investment strategy so far considered two domains: intensity and proactiveness; we enhance this concept by adding the domain of investment focus. Through this review, we made an attempt to answer three strategic questions related to IT investments: (i) level of investment that a firm should make in IT, that is, investment intensity; (ii) areas of firm where these investments should be more focused, that is, investment focus; and (iii) timing of investment, that is, whether to be an early mover in adopting IT or whether to invest relatively late compared to competitors.     

Section 365, mandatory bankruptcy rules and inefficient continuance

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code prohibits enforcement ofthe once common 'ipso facto clause.' The clause excuses thesolvent party from performance of the contract when the otherparty becomes insolvent. We show that the ability of insolventfirms to continue bad projects is enhanced by the absence ofipso facto clauses. Without such a clause, the firm can exploitthe inability of courts always to assess expectation damagesaccurately to compel a solvent party to stay in a bad deal.An ipso facto clause would preclude this outcome because theclause permits the solvent party to exist costlessly. Further,an ipso factor clause improves the managers' incentive to exerteffort to avoid financial distress. These results have two broaderimplications. First, that the important mandatory rule regulatingthe ability of solvent parties to exit is inefficient suggeststhat the justifications for the Bankruptcy Code's other mandatoryrules should be rethought. Second, our analysis suggests thatstakeholders such as contract partners of bankrupt firms mayhave important roles to play in inducing efficient bankruptcydecisions through their abilities to stop unproductive projectsthat bankrupt firms may otherwise continue.