A New Approach to Valuing Secured Claims in Bankruptcy
Harvard Law Review, Vol. 114, pp. 2386-2436, 2001
50 Pages Posted: 10 Apr 2001 Last revised: 10 May 2009
There are 2 versions of this paper
A New Approach to Valuing Secured Claims in Bankruptcy
A New Approach to Valuing Secured Claims in Bankruptcy
Abstract
In many business bankruptcies in which the firm is to be preserved as a going concern, one of the most difficult and important problems is that of valuing the assets that serve as collateral for secured creditors. Valuing a secured creditor's collateral is needed to determine the amount of the creditor's secured claim, which in turn affects the payout that must be made to the creditor. Such valuation has generally been believed to require either litigation or bargaining among the parties, which in turn give rise to uncertainty, delay, and deviations from parties' entitlements. This paper puts forward a new approach to valuing collateral that involves neither bargaining nor litigation. Under this approach, a market-based mechanism would determine the value of collateral in such a way that no participant in the bankruptcy would have a basis for complaining that secured creditors are either over- or under-compensated. Our approach would considerably improve the performance of business bankruptcy and could constitute an important element of any proposal for bankruptcy reform.
Keywords: bankruptcy, insolvency, secured debt, security interest, collateral, valuation, bankruptcy reform
JEL Classification: G33, K22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Debt Enforcement Around the World
By Simeon Djankov, Oliver Hart, ...
-
Debt Enforcement Around the World
By Simeon Djankov, Oliver Hart, ...
-
By Arturo Bris, Ivo Welch, ...
-
By Stuart C. Gilson, Edith S. Hotchkiss, ...
-
By Lawrence A. Weiss and Karen H. Wruck
-
Asset Efficiency and Reallocation Decisions of Bankrupt Firms
-
Bankruptcy Around the World: Explanations of its Relative Use
By Stijn Claessens and Leora F. Klapper
-
Do Bankruptcy Codes Matter? A Study of Defaults in France, Germany and the UK
By Sergei Davydenko and Julian R. Franks
-
Vulture Investors and the Market for Control of Distressed Firms