IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/ejlwec/v47y2019i1d10.1007_s10657-018-9599-2.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Corporate insolvency procedures in England: the uneasy case for liquidations

Author

Listed:
  • Régis Blazy

    (EM Strasbourg Business School, IEP Strasbourg, LARGE)

  • Nirjhar Nigam

    (ICN Business School, CEREFIGE and LARGE)

Abstract

Our paper investigates a comprehensive sample of 574 English corporate insolvency cases, including direct liquidation cases. In contrast to other insolvency procedures, liquidations perform poorly on average and fail to produce satisfactory repayments to creditors. We run multinomial Logit regressions to explain the choice between liquidation and reorganization. We obtain three main results. First, we confirm that size matters: distressed firms owning low assets have higher chances of being liquidated immediately. Second, the presence of secured creditors decreases the risk of direct liquidation. This provides a clue that in England, the most-informed creditors adapt their strategies and turn away from the less-performing procedures. Third, we find that the likelihood of administration—which appears nowadays as the main alternative to direct liquidation—significantly depends on the proportion of fixed/current assets owned by the firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Régis Blazy & Nirjhar Nigam, 2019. "Corporate insolvency procedures in England: the uneasy case for liquidations," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 47(1), pages 89-123, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:ejlwec:v:47:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10657-018-9599-2
    DOI: 10.1007/s10657-018-9599-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10657-018-9599-2
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10657-018-9599-2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

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

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Philippe Aghion & Oliver D. Hart & John Moore, 1994. "The Economics of Bankruptcy Reform," NBER Chapters, in: The Transition in Eastern Europe, Volume 2, Restructuring, pages 215-244, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Tristan Boyer & Régis Blazy, 2014. "Born to be alive? The survival of innovative and non-innovative French micro-start-ups," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 42(4), pages 669-683, April.
    3. Everett, Jim & Watson, John, 1998. "Small Business Failure and External Risk Factors," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 11(4), pages 371-390, December.
    4. Oliver Hart, 2006. "Different approaches to bankruptcy," ifo DICE Report, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 4(01), pages 3-8, April.
    5. repec:ces:ifodic:v:4:y:2006:i:1:p:14567411 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. World Bank, 2018. "Doing Business 2018," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 28608, December.
    7. Maria Brouwer, 2006. "Reorganization in US and European Bankruptcy law," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 22(1), pages 5-20, July.
    8. Arturo Bris & Ivo Welch & Ning Zhu, 2006. "The Costs of Bankruptcy: Chapter 7 Liquidation versus Chapter 11 Reorganization," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(3), pages 1253-1303, June.
    9. Stephen Bond & Julie Ann Elston & Jacques Mairesse & Benoît Mulkay, 2003. "Financial Factors and Investment in Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom: A Comparison Using Company Panel Data," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 85(1), pages 153-165, February.
    10. Gert Wehinger, 2012. "Bank deleveraging, the move from bank to market-based financing, and SME financing," OECD Journal: Financial Market Trends, OECD Publishing, vol. 2012(1), pages 65-79.
    11. Julian Franks & Oren Sussman, 2005. "Financial Distress and Bank Restructuring of Small to Medium Size UK Companies," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 9(1), pages 65-96.
    12. Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1998. "Law and Finance," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(6), pages 1113-1155, December.
    13. Saul Estrin & Tomasz Mickiewicz & Anna Rebmann, 2017. "Prospect theory and the effects of bankruptcy laws on entrepreneurial aspirations," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 48(4), pages 977-997, April.
    14. Grunert, Jens & Weber, Martin, 2009. "Recovery rates of commercial lending: Empirical evidence for German companies," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 505-513, March.
    15. Wennberg, Karl & Wiklund, Johan & DeTienne, Dawn R. & Cardon, Melissa S., 2010. "Reconceptualizing entrepreneurial exit: Divergent exit routes and their drivers," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 25(4), pages 361-375, July.
    16. Edward R. Morrison, 2007. "Bankruptcy Decision Making: An Empirical Study of Continuation Bias in Small-Business Bankruptcies," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 50(2), pages 381-419.
    17. Régis Blazy & Bertrand Chopard, 2012. "(Un)secured debt and the likelihood of court-supervised reorganization," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 34(1), pages 45-61, August.
    18. John Armour & Rizwaan Jameel Mokal, 2004. "Reforming The Governance Of Corporate Rescue: The Enterprise Act 2002," Working Papers wp289, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.
    19. David Citron & Mike Wright, 2008. "Bankruptcy costs, leverage and multiple secured creditors: The case of management buy‐outs," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(1), pages 71-89.
    20. Blazy, Régis & Deffains, Bruno & Umbhauer, Gisèle & Weill, Laurent, 2013. "Severe or gentle bankruptcy law: Which impact on investing and financing decisions?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 129-144.
    21. Haugen, Robert A. & Senbet, Lemma W., 1988. "Bankruptcy and Agency Costs: Their Significance to the Theory of Optimal Capital Structure," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(1), pages 27-38, March.
    22. World Bank, 2018. "The World Bank Annual Report 2018 [Informe Anual 2018 del Banco Mundial]," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 30326, December.
    23. Small, Kenneth A & Hsiao, Cheng, 1985. "Multinomial Logit Specification Tests," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 26(3), pages 619-627, October.
    24. John Armour & Bernard Black & Brian Cheffins & Richard Nolan, 2009. "Private Enforcement of Corporate Law: An Empirical Comparison of the United Kingdom and the United States," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 6(4), pages 687-722, December.
    25. Wruck, Karen Hopper, 1990. "Financial distress, reorganization, and organizational efficiency," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 419-444, October.
    26. Régis Blazy & Bertrand Chopard & Nirjhar Nigam, 2013. "Building Legal Indexes to Explain Recovery Rates: An Analysis of the French and English Bankruptcy Codes," Post-Print hal-01385918, HAL.
    27. Fama, Eugene F, 1990. "Contract Costs and Financing Decisions," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 63(1), pages 71-91, January.
    28. Blazy, Régis & Chopard, Bertrand & Nigam, Nirjhar, 2013. "Building legal indexes to explain recovery rates: An analysis of the French and English bankruptcy codes," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 1936-1959.
    29. Titman, Sheridan, 1984. "The effect of capital structure on a firm's liquidation decision," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 137-151, March.
    30. Regis Blazy & Bertrand Chopard & Nirjhar Nigam, 2013. "Building Legal Indexes to Explain Recovery Rates: An Analysis of the French and English Bankruptcy Codes," Post-Print hal-01369460, HAL.
    31. repec:cep:stitep:/1992/250 is not listed on IDEAS
    32. Yoshiro Miwa & J. Mark Ramseyer, 2008. "The Implications of Trade Credit for Bank Monitoring: Suggestive Evidence from Japan," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(2), pages 317-343, June.
    33. Webb, David C, 1987. "The Importance of Incomplete Information in Explaining the Existence of Costly Bankruptcy," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 54(215), pages 279-288, August.
    34. White, Michelle J, 1989. "The Corporate Bankruptcy Decision," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 3(2), pages 129-151, Spring.
    35. Marianna Succurro, 2012. "Bankruptcy systems and economic performance across countries: some empirical evidence," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 33(1), pages 101-126, February.
    36. Beck, Thorsten & Demirgüç-Kunt, Asli & Maksimovic, Vojislav, 2008. "Financing patterns around the world: Are small firms different?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(3), pages 467-487, September.
    37. Thorburn, Karin S., 2000. "Bankruptcy auctions: costs, debt recovery, and firm survival," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(3), pages 337-368, December.
    38. Julian Franks & Oren Sussman, 2005. "Financial Distress and Bank Restructuring of Small to Medium Size UK Companies," Review of Finance, Springer, vol. 9(1), pages 65-96, March.
    39. World Bank, 2014. "The World Bank Annual Report 2014 [Informe anual 2014 del Banco Mundial]," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 20093, December.
    40. Berkovitch, Elazar & Israel, Ronen & Zender, Jaime F., 1997. "Optimal bankruptcy law and firm-specific investments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(3-5), pages 487-497, April.
    41. Sergei A. Davydenko & Julian R. Franks, 2008. "Do Bankruptcy Codes Matter? A Study of Defaults in France, Germany, and the U.K," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(2), pages 565-608, April.
    42. Nico Dewaelheyns & Cynthia Hulle, 2008. "Legal reform and aggregate small and micro business bankruptcy rates: evidence from the 1997 Belgian bankruptcy code," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 31(4), pages 409-424, December.
    43. Ravenscraft, David J, 1983. "Structure-Profit Relationships at the Line of Business and Industry Level," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 65(1), pages 22-31, February.
    44. Oliver Hart, 2006. "Different approaches to bankruptcy," ifo DICE Report, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 4(1), pages 3-8, 04.
    45. Meghana Ayyagari & Thorsten Beck & Asli Demirguc-Kunt, 2007. "Small and Medium Enterprises Across the Globe," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 29(4), pages 415-434, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Alain Marciano & Giovanni Ramello & Hans-Bernd Schaefer, 2020. "Foreword, special issue: economic analysis of litigations 2," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 1-5, August.
    2. Cepec, Jaka & Grajzl, Peter, 2020. "Debt-to-equity conversion in bankruptcy reorganization and post-bankruptcy firm survival," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    3. Alessandro Danovi & Iacopo Donati & Ilaria Forestieri & Tommaso Orlando & Andrea Zorzi, 2020. "Business continuity in times of distress: debt restructuring agreements and compositions with creditors in Italy," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 574, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Régis Blazy & Joël Petey & Laurent Weill, 2018. "Serving the creditors after insolvency filings: from value creation to value distribution," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 45(2), pages 331-375, April.
    2. Régis Blazy & Nicolae Stef, 2020. "Bankruptcy procedures in the post-transition economies," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 7-64, August.
    3. Blazy, Régis & Martel, Jocelyn & Nigam, Nirjhar, 2014. "The choice between informal and formal restructuring: The case of French banks facing distressed SMEs," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 248-263.
    4. Jaka Cepec & Peter Grajzl & Katarina Zajc, 2016. "Debt Recovery in Firm Liquidations: Do Liquidation Trustees Matter?," CESifo Working Paper Series 6034, CESifo.
    5. Régis BLAZY & Nicolae STEF, 2015. "How do bankruptcy systems perform in Eastern Europe?," Working Papers of LaRGE Research Center 2015-07, Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie (LaRGE), Université de Strasbourg.
    6. Blazy, Régis & Letaief, Aziza, 2017. "When secured and unsecured creditors recover the same: The emblematic case of the Tunisian corporate bankruptcies," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 19-41.
    7. Jaka Cepec & Peter Grajzl & Katarina Zajc, 2016. "Debt Recovery in Firm Liquidations: Do Liquidation Trustees Matter?," Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia, Finanza e Statistica 24/2016, Università di Perugia, Dipartimento Economia.
    8. Simeon Djankov & Oliver Hart & Caralee McLiesh & Andrei Shleifer, 2008. "Debt Enforcement around the World," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 116(6), pages 1105-1149, December.
    9. Stef, Nicolae, 2022. "How does legal design affect the initiation of a firm's bankruptcy?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    10. Blazy, Régis & Chopard, Bertrand & Nigam, Nirjhar, 2013. "Building legal indexes to explain recovery rates: An analysis of the French and English bankruptcy codes," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 1936-1959.
    11. Dewaelheyns, Nico & Van Hulle, Cynthia, 2009. "Filtering speed in a Continental European reorganization procedure," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 375-387, December.
    12. Agrawal, Ashwini & González-Uribe, Juanita & Martínez-Correa, Jimmy, 2022. "Measuring the ex-ante incentive effects of creditor control rights during bankruptcy reorganization," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 381-408.
    13. Ewelina Mruk & Inmaculada Aguiar-Díaz & Maria Victoria Ruiz-Mallorquí, 2019. "Use of formal insolvency procedure and judicial efficiency in Spain," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 47(3), pages 435-470, June.
    14. Stef, Nicolae, 2018. "Bankruptcy and the difficulty of firing," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 85-94.
    15. Cepec, Jaka & Grajzl, Peter, 2020. "Debt-to-equity conversion in bankruptcy reorganization and post-bankruptcy firm survival," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    16. Nicolae Stef, 2023. "Bankruptcy voting process and corporate reorganization," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 75(2), pages 508-524, April.
    17. Sylwia Morawska & Michal Lukowski & Kamil Gemra & Waldemar Rogowski & Przemyslaw Banasik & Blazej Prusak, 2021. "Financial Markets and Bankruptcy Systems: Is there a Relationship?," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(1), pages 735-747.
    18. Carmen Vargas Pérez & Juan Luis Peñaloza Figueroa, 2017. "Big Data and the Demand for Court and Legal Services," European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Articles, Revistia Research and Publishing, vol. 3, September.
    19. Hege, Ulrich, 2003. "Workouts, court-supervised reorganization and the choice between private and public debt," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 233-269, March.
    20. Chris Godfrey & Chris Brooks, 2015. "The Negative Credit Risk Premium Puzzle: A Limits to Arbitrage Story," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2015-07, Henley Business School, University of Reading.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Liquidation; Reorganization; Receivership; Administration; Corporate insolvency; England;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G33 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Bankruptcy; Liquidation
    • G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • K20 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - General
    • K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Business and Securities Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:kap:ejlwec:v:47:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10657-018-9599-2. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.