Bankruptcy 1995

Explains how serious the federal fiscal situation is, how the crisis happened, what will happen in the near future, and what can be done about it.

Explains how serious the federal fiscal situation is, how the crisis happened, what will happen in the near future, and what can be done about it.

This paper surveys early intellectual antecedents of the Krueger (2001) proposal for creating bankruptcy reorganization procedures at the international level. We focus on actual proposals for new procedures made from the late 1970s up to an influential lecture by Sachs (1995), with brief reference to the formal economics literature on sovereign debt. Beginning with a paper by Oechsli (1981), several key contributions are made during this period, including the analogy with domestic bankruptcy procedures, an understanding of the inefficiencies in international lending that might justify such procedures, and specific institutional and legal suggestions that continue to play a role in the current debate.

For many businesses, bankruptcy is a looming reality, one that can take many forms. Bankruptcy is such a fact of life that a tangle of laws exist in the U.S. legal code. The most widely recognised type, Chapter 11, permits the reorganisation, as opposed to the liquidation, of financially troubled businesses. An economic analysis has to start with the observation that business failure is not always bad, as efficiency in the economy demands continual reallocation of resources. This book offers a thorough overview of the bankruptcy laws and procedures American businesses and consumers are faced with.