Economic Analysis of Bankruptcy Law

本课题组从法学和经济学的交叉学科角度对日本破产法进行了分析。特别是，我们关注了破产法现在是如何运作的，以及应该如何为日本社会发挥作用。这一点非常雄心勃勃，不同于以往的研究，因为除了公司法等特定领域外，很难观察到法律学者和经济学家之间的合作与协调。跨学科的方法在日本的法律研究中并不占主导地位，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。我们开始适当地了解彼此的纪律，然后讨论了整个破产法律规则与破产外适用的规则有何不同。破产对于企业管理者来说是一种“非常规”选择，因为企业管理层更有可能被认为或预计将继续经营下去。不过，破产法应与公司进行“常规”重组策略(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，我们还将研究扩展到各种主题，如理想的抵押品和接管规则，保留员工的激励，保险公司和银行的管理等。在我们的研究期间，破产法和公司法进行了重大改革。然而，作为破产法的理论基础，我们的结果是至关重要的。

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.