Bidding in mandatory bankruptcy auctions: Theory and evidence

Bjorn Eckbo () and Karin Thorburn ()

No 2004/16, Discussion Papers from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science

Abstract: We analyze bidding incentives and present evidence on takeover premiums in mandatory Swedish bankruptcy auctions, where three-quarters of the firms are sold as going concerns. The bankrupt firms’ main creditors (banks) cannot bid in the auction and thus cannot directly influence the winning price. However, we find that the banks often finance bidders. We show that the optimal bid strategy for a bank-bidder coalition mimics a monopolist sales price, in effect getting around the institutional constraint on direct bank bidding. The final auction premium increases with a measure of the bank’s debt impairness observed at the beginning of the auction. Cross-sectional regressions with the auction premium as dependent variable support this prediction. There is no empirical support for the proposition that the auctions lead to fire-sale prices, where we use the number of bidders, the degree of industry-wide financial distress, and the business cycle as proxies for auction demand. Moreover, premiums in transactions where insiders repurchase the firm (salebacks) are on average indistinguishable from premiums in sales to company outsiders, which fails to support self-dealing arguments.

Keywords: Bankruptcy auctions; Optimal bid strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2004-12-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cfn and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/11250/164162 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://hdl.handle.net/11250/164162 [302 Found]--> https://www.unit.no/brage-denne-lenken-er-ikke-lenger-gyldig [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://sikt.no/brage-denne-lenken-er-ikke-lenger-gyldig)

Related works:
Working Paper: Bidding in Mandatory Bankruptcy Auctions: Theory and Evidence (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:nhhfms:2004_016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science NHH, Department of Business and Management Science, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stein Fossen ().