A primer on Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings: why the genders of the CEO and judge (may) matter

Wolfgang Breuer and Katharina Mersmann

The European Journal of Finance, 2025, vol. 31, issue 6, 696-724

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of CEO gender on corporate bankruptcy outcomes and how this impact is influenced by the gender of the presiding judge. Using logistic regression, we find that if the bankruptcy judge is male, female-led firms emerge from bankruptcy filings less often than male-led firms, even when we control for CEO-, firm-, industry-, and bankruptcy-level explanatory factors. We argue that our outcomes mainly result from a similarity bias in which judges prefer CEOs of their own gender. Female- and male-led firms are comparable except for female-led firms showing higher pre-filing cash levels. Hence, we posit that judges do not stereotype based on systematic differences between female- and male-led firms but instead based on internalized prejudices towards female CEOs.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/1351847X.2024.2415438

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