How the design of bankruptcy procedures impacts macroeconomic and employment outcomes in the post-Covid recovery period: lessons from previous crises

我们建议研究破产程序的设计如何影响宏观经济结果，以及在正常时期和经济危机时期，破产程序的设计是否应该有所不同。新冠肺炎危机为我们提出的研究提供了动力。政府的援助使一些企业能够在收入下降的情况下支付运营成本。尽管如此，这些企业的债务继续积累，随着危机的持续，这可能迫使企业破产。在新冠肺炎疫情后的复苏阶段，其中一些业务的收入将长期处于低位，需要关闭。然而，其中大多数国家将是可行的，必须找到一种方法，将其债务从困境水平降低。重新偿还陷入困境但仍能生存的企业的债务是破产程序的主题。然而，在新冠肺炎疫情复苏期间，标准程序可能帮助不大。这是因为程序冗长，而且实际上只有最大的公司才能采用。这场危机也威胁到大量中小企业的生存。如果这些企业大规模破产，危机将进一步加深，并将产生巨大的连锁效应。为了英国的经济复苏，我们建议修改破产程序，其中包括自动减记政府对企业的债权，以换取企业的私人债权人减记。我们建议建立在以前的工作在伦敦经济学院和调查更深入的破产程序和宏观经济之间的相互作用。我们计划从理论和实证两个方面对这一问题进行研究。

We propose to investigate how the design of bankruptcy procedures impacts macroeconomic outcomes, and whether the design should be different in normal times and during times of economic distress. The Covid-19 crisis provides motivation for our proposed research. Government assistance has allowed some businesses to cover their operating costs, despite declining revenues. Nonetheless, the debt of these businesses continues to accumulate and as the crisis persists this may force businesses into bankruptcy. In the post-Covid recovery phase, some of these businesses will have permanently low revenues and will need to close. The majority of them, however, will be viable, and a way must be found to bring their debt down from distress levels. Renegotiating the debt of distressed yet viable businesses is the subject of bankruptcy procedures. Yet, standard procedures are likely to be of little help during the Covid-19 recovery. This is because the procedures are lengthy and available in practice only to the largest firms. The crisis threatens the survival of a large number of small and medium firms as well. If these firms go bankrupt at a wide scale, the crisis will deepen, and there will be large knock-on effects.For the purposes of the United Kingdom's economic recovery we propose a revised bankruptcy procedure, which includes an automatic write-down on government claims on a firm in exchange for write-downs by the firm's private creditors. We propose to build on previous work done at the London School of Economics and investigate in more depth the interplay between bankruptcy procedures and the macroeconomy. We plan to study this issue both theoretically and empirically.