Bankruptcy procedures in the post-transition economies

Régis Blazy and Nicolae Stef ()
Additional contact information
Nicolae Stef: Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2020, vol. 50, issue 1, No 2, 7-64

Abstract: Abstract In the absence of well-developed financial markets, bankruptcy procedures provide useful mechanisms to ease and organize the capital transfers of distressed businesses. From an investor’s perspective, such court-supervised ways of solving financial distress are part of the attractiveness of the post-transition economies that eventually integrated the European Union. This article originally analyzes the content of bankruptcy files handled by the courts operating in three Eastern European countries: Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Our approach mostly focuses on the two fundamental issues that bankruptcy courts must solve when the question of repayments arises: (1) maximizing and (2) sharing the debtor’s value. We first find that the investors’ recovery power strongly depends on the local rules prevailing after bankruptcy filing (legal indexes) and on the type of procedure engaged (reorganization vs. liquidation). Second, total recoveries do not benefit from the presence of public claims suggesting some passivity from the state, in the context of post-transition. Conversely, junior creditors exert a positive influence on total recoveries despite their poor legal protection, which contrasts with secured creditors (confirming the bad incentives that collaterals may generate). In addition, as in Western Europe, the Eastern European bankruptcy systems provide stronger protection for private secured claims than for public claims.

Keywords: Bankruptcy; Recoveries; Legal indexes; Transition economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G33 K22 P34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10657-019-09634-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:kap:ejlwec:v:50:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s10657-019-09634-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-019-09634-5

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano

More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().