The Impact of Bankruptcy Rules on Risky Project Choice and Skill Formation Under Credit Rationing
33 Pages Posted: 11 May 2002
Date Written: August 2001
Abstract
The contribution of this paper is in emphasizing endogenous credit rationing in the analysis of effects of bankruptcy rules on entrepeneurs' decisions with respect to risk-taking and ex ante skill-development. Unlike most of the literature, both the debt claim and the amount of debt financing is endogenous in our exercise. This allows us to determine the extent of credit rationing that banks use to tackle informational asymmetry. Credit rationing is non-trivial and increases the cost of capital when corporations are forced to access alternative sources of funding even when debt is a cheaper alternative. We thus solve for optimal debt-equity ratios in the capital structure of the corporation and entrepeneurs' risk-taking. Second, we allow entrepeneurs to invest in generating skill to handle risky projects. We show that bankruptcy policies are important determinants of risky project choice and skill-development in ways that in some cases contradict the existing literature, which does not consider endogenous credit rationing.
Keywords: Bankruptcy rules, credit rationing, project choice
JEL Classification: G33, K22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
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