The fees of professionals (financial advisors, lawyers, accountants) are a substantial fraction of bankruptcy costs. Scholars have considered how best to reduce these costs but have not considered how they should be allocated among creditors. Creditors can spend redistributionally (to violate or uphold absolute priority) or productively (to increase the value of the bankrupt firm). An efficient bankruptcy cost allocation scheme should discourage redistributional and encourage productive creditor spending. We consider the desirability of various allocation schemes in a model in which senior and junior creditors can engage in both types of spending. We show that (1) the current U.S. cost allocation system is unsatisfactory because the scheme partially reimburses junior expenses for professionals but does not reimburse senior expenses and (2) a cost allocation scheme that approaches the first-best solution and is implementable would delegate the issue of professionals’ cost reimbursement to the debtor in possession.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Volume (Year): 34 (2005) Issue (Month): () Pages: 295-341 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML,
plain text,
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote),
ReDIF
Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlstud:v:34:y:2005:p:295-341
Contact details of provider: Postal: The University of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005 Chicago, IL 60637 Fax: (773) 753-0811 Email: Web page: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLS/
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)