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

我们建议调查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困境时期的设计是否应该有所不同。Covid-19危机为我们提出的研究提供了动力。尽管收入下降，但政府的援助使一些企业能够支付运营成本。尽管如此，这些企业的债务仍在不断累积，随着危机的持续，这可能会迫使企业破产。在新冠肺炎疫情后的恢复阶段，其中一些企业的收入将永远很低，需要关闭。然而，它们中的大多数将是可行的，必须找到一种方法来降低它们的债务水平。重新谈判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Covid-19的恢复过程中，标准程序可能没有什么帮助。这是因为程序冗长，而且实际上只有最大的公司才能使用。这场危机也威胁到大量中小企业的生存。如果这些公司大规模破产，危机将会加深，并将产生巨大的连锁反应。为了英国的经济复苏，我们建议修订破产程序，其中包括政府对公司的债权自动减记，以换取公司私人债权人的减记。我们建议在伦敦经济学院之前所做的工作的基础上，更深入地调查破产程序与宏观经济之间的相互作用。我们打算从理论和实证两方面来研究这个问题。

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.