对企业债务结构和破产设计【外文翻译】 .doc

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1、本科毕业论文（设计）外 文 翻 译原文：The Design of Corporate Debt Structure and BankruptcyBankruptcy law regulates the interaction between debtors and creditors when debtors default and the parties cannot work out their differences outside the courts. The law addresses two main types of conflicts: conflicts between

2、a debtor and her creditors, and conflicts among creditors themselves. Empirically,this latter type of conflict is themajor source of complexity in modern bankruptcy law, and has therefore given rise to a substantial literature, much of which in law. This literature typically takes an ex-post perspec

3、tive: how to sort out claims once the firm is bankrupt, given the contractual and legal arrangements in place. But the way ex-post conflicts are resolved also influences the initial financing and valuation of the firm, which suggests that the two problems should be analyzed jointly. In fact, the pro

4、blem of bankruptcy is most interesting when posed in an ex-ante framework as it raises what seems like a paradox: if bankruptcy with multiple creditors is so complex,why would a firm contract with several creditors in the first place? Put differently:if conflicts of interest must be resolved ex post

5、 anyhow and these resolutions are costly, why create them and how structure them exante?We attempt to answer these questions in an optimal contracting approach to corporate debt and bankruptcy.The paper analyzes a firms choice of debt structure and its effect on incentives for strategic default. We

6、start from the observation that multiple creditors make contract renegotiations more difficult and emphasize a) the ex-post conflicts among multiple creditors, b) the design of individual claims and their impact on these conflicts and c) the role of bankruptcy rules in resolving such conflicts from

7、an ex ante perspective. In our model, having multiple creditors gives rise to potential ex-post inefficiency, which stems from frictions in multilateral conflict resolution. This corresponds to the well-known inefficiencies in the workouts of financial distress, documented,e.g., by Asquith, Gertner,

8、 and Scharfstein (1994). However, in the spirit of the literature on strategic capital structure design,1 we note that this ex-post inefficiency also has a positive incentive effect, as it forces the firm to honor several claims instead of only one if it wants to avoid the ex-post inefficiency.To pr

9、ovide an intuition for why two investors are better than one in our model, consider a firm seeking outside finance from two investors. Following Hart and Moore (1998), we describe the moral-hazard problem of the firm in repaying its financiers by assuming that the project generates some un-verifiabl

10、e cash flows next to the verifiable assets. In this setup, repayment is limited by how much asset value the financiers can credibly threaten to liquidate.Under perfect renegotiation (or with one single creditor), the firms commitment ability is in principle given by the amount of assets available fo

11、r foreclosure should the firm default. However, this constraint is relaxed if the firm is forced to renegotiate individually with its creditors. If this is the case, the firm can promise ex ante up to the full amount of available assets to each one of the investors. When the firm only defaults on on

12、e investor expost, this investor has the right to foreclose on the firms assets to collect her debt. As each creditor has this individual right, the firm must pay out twice its asset value if it wants to protect its assets. Hence, a renegotiation with two creditors credibly commits the firm to pay o

13、ut twice in order to avoid renegoatiation. These higher repayment obligations, however, also increase the incentives for strategic default, in which case the inefficiency of the creditor interaction ex post destroys value. This creates a counterveiling force to the commitment effect of high individu

14、al debt claims and thus leads to a tradeoff in the design of these claims.We have analyzed the design of bankruptcy rules and debt structure in an optimal-contracting perspective. If cash flow is not verifiable and only the asset value of the firm is verifiable, then when a firm borrows from a singl

15、e creditor and has all bargaining power, its debt capacity is limited to the value of its asset base. The reason is that the creditor can never expect to receive more than the asset value in liquidation and in renegotiation. However,when a firm borrows from more than one creditor, it can increase it

16、s debt capacity by pledging its asset base to more than one creditor by giving each the right to foreclose individually. If the debt structure of the firm is designed appropriately, this creates a commitment for the firm to pay out more in good states to prevent the exercise of individual foreclosur

17、e rights and thus raises the firms debt capacity. Having multiple creditors thus helps to reduce the negative effects of the lack of commitment in contracting by distinguishing between individual foreclosure rights and joint liquidation rights achieved under bankruptcy.Our theory provides a bridge b

18、etween corporate finance and the legal theory of debtor-creditor law. The key distinction in debtor-creditor law in most jurisdictions is that between debt collection law and bankruptcy law. The former governs the interaction between the debtor and a single creditor, the latter the interaction betwe

19、en the debtor and several creditors. Our analysis shows how this same distinction can be made in a contract-theoretic approach to debt. Individual foreclosure rights (corresponding to debt-collection law)are crucial to generate repayment incentives, but need to be complemented by collective liquidia

20、tion rights (corresponding to bankruptcy law) in order to maximize ex-post efficiency.Our results on debt structure and overleverage under multiple creditors depend on the fact that creditors have unilateral foreclosure rights that they can exercise in case of default, independently of what other cr

21、editors decide.These rights should be seen as an important element of investor protection.The renegotiation procedure modeled in this paper emphasises the effect of these rights since renegotiation is assumed to happen on an individual basis.The ensuing non-cooperative game between creditors forces

22、the debtor to respect contractual claims as given by individual foreclosure rights whenever he wants to avoid default. The key assumption in this approach is that it is difficult and costly to bring the creditors together to renegotiate the debt contract collectively. Only bankruptcy brings all the

23、contracting parties together at one table, but in bankruptcy the debtor has given up his residual ownership rights, and the procedure is mostly concerned with the reconciliation of individual liquidation claims. This is the classical “vis attractiva” of bankruptcy.Yet, it is theoretically conceivabl

24、e that the debtor can unite the group of creditors and extract from them joint concessions under the threat of bankruptcy. If such workouts are frictionless, debt structure becomes irrelevant,because individual collection rights have no bite in enforcing claims.As documented, e.g., by Asquith, and S

25、charfstein (1994) and Gilson(1997), however, frictions in such negotiations are usually substantial and increasewith the number of creditors. One important reason for these frictions is the hold-up problemof individual creditors, which is precisely the reason for institutionalised bankruptcy rules a

26、s discussed in Section 4. Further reasons (which we ignore in this paper) include the aggregation of asymmetric information among multiple creditors and the legal uncertainty accompanying out-of-court debt renegotiations, if individual creditors have the possibility of contesting the new arrangement

27、 in court.Our model has been kept deliberately simple and parsimonious. The assumption that long-term asset value V is not verifiable has allowed us to focus solely on short-term debt contracts. In a more general model, V would have a verifiable and an unverifiable component. The verifiable componen

28、t would give rise to long-term debt and to the possibility to reschedule shortterm debt in debt renegotiation. The assumption that V A has focused the analysis on the case of efficient ex-post continuation. In the more general case V A ，there are situations in which expost there is no conflict of in

29、terest and the only question is how to divide the liquidation value of the firm. None of the insights of the analysis are changed, but the analysis becomes more complicated.The analysis has been confined to the case of two creditors. To what ex-tent would our insights generalize to more than two cre

30、ditors? The analysis would become more complicated because now contracts have to specify what each creditor gets in liquidation for every subset of creditors who choose to foreclose in the renegotiation game. Yet, in most simple extensions of our foreclosure game creditors would still have the incen

31、tive to liquidate individually if they are not paid their face value and all others do not liquidate. Hence,the basic logic of our model applies, and our analysis suggests that more creditors are better able to extract higher repayments ex post. Of course, with many creditors, the simplifying assump

32、tion of no liquidity constraints becomes unreasonable, and the optimal number of creditors should emerge from trading off higher ex-post extraction in good states against more inefficient liquidation in bad states. In our model, all results are derived as parts of an optimal ex-ante contract between

33、 debtor and creditors. Strictly speaking this suggests that there is no need for a law. In practice, however, there may well be, if individuals are unable to join the initial grand contract and write contracts specifying procedures of collective behavior. In fact, this is the classical Rawlsian just

34、ification of legislation as a substitute for contracting in the “original position” (Rawls, 1971), an approach to law, and bankruptcy law in particular, that is wide-spread in legal thinking. The classic text of Jackson (1986), for example,when exploring the foundations of bankruptcy law, only argue

35、s that a “collective system of debt collection law” is needed, relegating the issue of private contracting to a footnote. Building on this approach to the foundations of bankruptcy law, our contribution is to make the hypothetical private contract explicit.The role for a law in our model therefore i

36、s that of a general rule that completes individual incomplete contracts, when these contracts cannot be executed in isolation. Going one step further, there is also an intersting role for bankruptcy courts in our model. One obvious such role of bankruptcy courts with great practical importance is th

37、at of a certification agency that verifies the firms asset value A and the outstanding claims against the firm. We have gone beyond that and shown that courts are important in imposing an automatic stay to prevent a run for the assets and supervise the contractually agreed collective liquidation pro

38、cedure. In fact,our model shows that there is an important conceptual distinction between out-of-bankruptcy negotiations and bankruptcy. These two events are both inefficient ex-post, but for different reasons: negotiations out of bankruptcy are inefficient because the parties have difficulties to c

39、oordinate and avoid free-riding. Bankruptcy has no coordination costs because the law forces the parties around one table, but since the court enforces the liquidation promise of the original contract, asset value is destroyed inefficiently. Going one step further, in our model courts can also have

40、a role in determining the distribution of the asset value to the creditors. As we have argued, it is difficult exante to fix bankruptcy payouts Bi contractually because not everybody has joined the initial grand contract. Hence, these payouts must be set ex-post in a situation of widely diverging in

41、terests. Our model provides guidelines of the type Bi = gi(D1, D2, I1, I2) that determine bankruptcy payments as a function of nominal claims. Note that aggregate bankruptcy payout in our model is linked to total debt by B = (1(D). Bankruptcy courts can use this type of relation to implement rules f

42、or individual payments.Another line of research to develop our model further is to analyze the effect of different renegotiation procedures. We have considered a fixed bargaining game between debtor and creditors, and analyzed its implications for debt structure and bankruptcy. This bargaining game,

43、 bilateral exchange offers,captures some important features and frictions of debt renegotiations,but, in the spirit of Harris and Raviv (1995), it would be useful to compare this structure to others. For these and other extensions, our model may be a useful building block that allows to develop a mo

44、re comprehensive theory of bankruptcy and ultimately contribute to a broader comparative analysis of the workings and effects of different bankruptcy laws.Source ：Erik Berglof, Gerard Roland and so on,2008, “The Design of Corporate Debt Structure and Bankruptcy”. Review of Financial Studies，vol.23,n

45、o. 7,July.PP.2648-2679译文：对企业债务结构和破产设计当债务人违约，当事人不能在法庭以外的解决他们之间的分歧，破产法的规定能帮助解决债务人和债权人之间的这个矛盾。这个法律会主要解决两种冲突：债务人和债权人之间的冲突；债权人之间的冲突。从经验上看，后一种冲突产生来源是复杂的现代破产法，因此产生大量的与之相关文献研究，相当一部分与法律有关。这些文献通常需要一个事后的观点：一旦公司破产因考虑到地方的合同和法律安排，如何清理债权。但事后解决冲突的方式也影响了该公司的初始资金和公司的价值评估，这表明这两个问题应该共同分析。事实上，破产的问题最吸引人的地方在于事前预期的框架，它似乎是相

46、互矛盾的：如果有多个债权人的公司破产是如此复杂的，那为什么公司在第一时间与几家债权人签合同？换句话说：如果事后这些利益冲突必须得到解决同时解决这些冲突要花费很大成本，为什么以及如何决它们的事前构成？我们试图对企业债务以及破产这些问题用一个最佳的方法一起解决。本文分析了企业选择的债务融资结构，以及它对战略性违约的抑制作用。我们观察得出多债权人的合同使的谈判变的更难：1、多债权人使得事后矛盾更多，2、他们之间冲突会影响个人理赔，3、破产规则的是从事后视角去解决这些冲突的。在我们模型中，由于有多个债权人的存在，源于在多变解决冲突会使得事后无效率。我们所得出的结论对应于著名的低效率的金融危机证明，例如

47、，阿斯奎斯格特纳和斯切夫斯坦证明（1944）。然而，在关于战略资本结构设计文学精髓中，我们注意到这种事后低效率也有积极的激励作用，如果公司想要避免事后低效率，使得公司兑现承诺，而不是几个索赔。在我们的模型中给我一种直觉两个债权人永远比一个债权人好，考虑一家公司向两个债权人获得资金。哈特和摩尔的研究（1998）向我们描述偿还问题中的道德风险问题，当清算资产中出现了一些无法核查但却是存在的资产。在这个假设中，还款受限制于资产价值的多少时能威胁到债权人的亲算。在完全重新谈判（或与一个单一的债权人），公司承诺的偿债能力以默认公司现有资产为原则。然而，如果该公司与个别债权人重新谈判，那么它的约束将会被放

48、松。在这样的情况下，公司可以保证事前到现有的全额资产足以支付每个投资者的债务。当公司即使只对一个投资者违约，这个投资者也有权没收公司资产来偿还她的债务。当每个债权人都有这个权利时，公司为了保护其资产的安全必须准备两倍于债务的资产价值。因此，与两个以上债权人重新谈判，这是可以信的承诺，公司支付两倍，以避免重新谈判。这些较高的还款义务还增加了战略性违约惩罚，在这种情况下，债权人时候相互作用变低了。这将创建一个以高个人债权承诺的影响力，导致对这些索赔有一个权衡的设计。我们已经分析了代理成本对破产成本和债务结构的影响。假设公司没有可以抵押的现金，只有固定资产可以作为抵押物，公司已固定资产作为抵押时能更

49、方便的获取债务，得到更多的债务。原因可能是债权人在价值清算中获得远远超过当初债务的价值。然而，公司从拥有多个债权人时，企业能通过将固定资产抵押给多个债权人来增加它的借债能力。如果该公司的债务结构设计合理，该公司债务处于一个良好状态，这将是一保证，以防止债务人行使止赎权，从而提高了企业的负债能力。因为多名债权人为了获得个人求偿权，所以公司在债权人联合监督下破产清算，这样可以减少公司因破产而产生的负面影响。我们的理论为企业融资和债务债权法之间建立了一座桥梁。大多数地方债务债权法的主要区别在于抵债式股份法和破产法。以前研究的是单个债权人和债务人之间的相互治理效应，现在研究的是多个债权人和债务人之间相互治理效应。我们用合同理论的方法分析了它们之间的区别。抵债式股份法(对应回笼法)是至关重要的能产生激励效应，但是为了最大限度的增加效率需要补充的全体债权人的清算求偿权利（对应破产法）。我们研究结果显示债务结构和高财务杠杆作用能否实现取决于债权人，因为债权人有单方面的止赎权利，他们可以在债务人违约时独立于其他债权人行使权利。这些权利能保护投资者的权益。本文的研究模型建立基于种权利对每个债权人影响。接下来债务人和债权人之间合同建立在