IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/eee/lawchp/2-14.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Bankruptcy Law

In: Handbook of Law and Economics

Author

Listed:
  • White, Michelle J.

Abstract

Bankruptcy is the legal process whereby financially distressed firms, individuals, and occasionally governments resolve their debts. The bankruptcy process for firms plays a central role in economics, because competition drives inefficient firms out of business, thereby raising the average efficiency level of those remaining. The main economic function of corporate bankruptcy is to reduce the cost of default by having a government-sponsored procedure that resolves all debts simultaneously. The main economic function of personal bankruptcy is to provide partial consumption insurance to individual debtors and therefore reduce the social cost of debt. This chapter surveys theoretical and empirical research on both types of bankruptcy.

Suggested Citation

  • White, Michelle J., 2007. "Bankruptcy Law," Handbook of Law and Economics, in: A. Mitchell Polinsky & Steven Shavell (ed.), Handbook of Law and Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 14, pages 1013-1072, Elsevier.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:lawchp:2-14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B7P5W-4R2PJJM-7/1/39c876f36460dd112aac4ea2f4aecf56
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Berger, Allen N. & Cerqueiro, Geraldo & Penas, María F., 2011. "Does debtor protection really protect debtors? Evidence from the small business credit market," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(7), pages 1843-1857, July.
    2. Mankart, Jochen & Rodano, Giacomo, 2015. "Personal bankruptcy law, debt portfolios, and entrepreneurship," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 157-172.
    3. Binder Jens-Hinrich, 2013. "Durchsetzung von Marktdisziplin mittels zwangsweiser Übertragung systemrelevanter Teile von Banken? / The Enforcement of Market Discipline through a Transfer of Systemic Functions in Banks," ORDO. Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, De Gruyter, vol. 64(1), pages 377-404, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:lawchp:2-14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevierdirect.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780444512352 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.