Economic Analysis of Bankruptcy Law

本课题组从法经济学的交叉视角对日本的破产法进行了分析。特别是，我们关注的是破产法现在是如何运作的，应该如何为日本社会发挥作用。这一点是非常雄心勃勃的，不同于以往的研究，因为法律的学者和经济学家之间的合作和协调，除了一个特定的领域，如公司法，很难观察到。在日本的法律的研究中，跨学科的方法并不占主导地位，因此，我们的挑战性研究在研究之初就被认为是有效的，实际上也是如此。我们开始适当地理解彼此的学科，然后讨论破产的整个法律的规则与破产以外的规则有何不同。破产是一种“不规则”的选择，因为企业管理更有可能假设或预期继续下去。然而，破产法应该与公司进行“常规”重组战略（如出售公司资产）时适用的法律保持一致。这是我们研究的一个主要结论。此外，我们还将研究范围扩大到了理想的抵押品和收购规则、保持员工的激励、保险公司和银行的管理等各种主题。在我们的研究期间，破产法和公司法进行了重大改革。然而，我们的结果是至关重要的，作为破产法的理论基础。

Our research group has analyzed the bankruptcy law in Japan from an interdisciplinary viewpoint of law and economics. Especially, we have focused on how the bankruptcy law is working now and should be functioning for the Japanese society. This point was very ambitious and different from previous studies because the collaboration and coordination between legal scholars and economists could be hardly observed except a particular field such as the corporate law. The interdisciplinary approach has not been dominant in the legal study in Japan, and thus, our challenging study was considered effective at the beginning of our research, and actually, that was true.We started to understand each other's discipline appropriately, and then, discussed how different the whole legal rules of bankruptcy are from the rules that are applied outside bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a kind of 'irregular' option for firm managers since firm management is more likely assumed or expected to continue. The bankruptcy law, however, should be consistent with the law that is applied when firms engage in 'regular' restructuring strategies such as sales of firms' assets. This is a main conclusion of our research. Moreover, we extended our study to various topics such as desirable collateral and takeover rules, keeping incentives of employees, management of insurance companies and banks, and so on.The bankruptcy law and the corporate law were drastically reformed during our research period. Our results, however, are crucial as the theoretical foundation of the bankruptcy law.