文澜金融论坛（第308期）

摘要：

The bankruptcy process in many countries is lengthy and cumbersome, which prevents creditors from recovering their claims in distress. Exploiting the staggered introduction of specialized bankruptcy courts appointing professional judges in China, we find that they lead to a 7.6% reduction in the cost of debt financing, with a stronger effect for issuers of higher default risk. To establish the direction of causality, we focus on differences in court enforcement, namely bankruptcy court versus civil court, across otherwise similar bordering counties located within the same province. By analyzing manually collected bankruptcy filings, we uncover the mechanism with reductions in liquidations, shorter bankruptcy proceedings, less government interference, and higher creditor recovery rates. We further exploit the heterogeneous debt enforcement across Chinese prefectures, together with the bankruptcy reform to estimate the elasticity of bond prices to local enforcement. Improvement in court efficiency translates into significant increases in debt capacity, bond maturity, and investment by bond issuers. These results indicate that stronger court enforcement is a necessary precondition in handling the USD 120.2 billion bond defaults.

主讲人介绍：

李波，现任北京大学光华管理学院金融学助理教授，曾任教于清华大学五道口金融学院10年。主要研究方向为公司金融、政治经济学和经济史。最新研 究包括新兴市场（尤其是中国）的技术采用和人才配置以及政府、机构和公司之间的影响。她的研究涵盖了一系列经济社会重要问题主题，如反腐败、破产法、产业政策和风险投资市场。她的研究成果发表在各种国际顶级的学术期刊上，例如 Journal of Political Economy, Review of Finance, the Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting。论文发表 Investing with the Government: A Field Experiment in China（《与政府共同投资：来自政府引导基金的一项实验》）获得第四届青木昌彦经济学论文优胜奖。李老师获得皇后大学经济学博士学位、英属哥伦比亚大学经济学硕士学位、西方大学经济学学士学位。