Bankruptcy's Redistributive Policies: Net Value or a ‘Zero-Sum Game’?

Although federal bankruptcy law, epitomized by Chapter 11, has a pro-debtor—or at least, anti-liquidation—bias, no scholarship analyzes whether that bias creates net value or merely results in a zero-sum game that redistributes value from creditors to debtors. My article, Bankruptcy’s Redistributive Policies: Net Value or a ‘Zero-Sum Game’? (available here  and forthcoming in 99 American Bankruptcy Law Journal (issue no. 2, Aug. 2025)), shows that the bias is due more to accidents of history, path dependence, and self-interested lobbying than to any reasoned analysis of value creation. The bias is also inconsistent with many foreign insolvency laws.

My article analyzes whether bankruptcy law should have such a pro-debtor bias. An empirical analysis of that question is not generally feasible because debtor and creditor costs and benefits in bankruptcy cannot be accurately quantified and compared. The closest empirical analysis comes from Poland, which, in the last decade, changed the bias of its bankruptcy proceedings from pro-creditor to pro-debtor. Several finance scholars attempted to assess the impact of this change, finding that the new pro-debtor model may be less effective than the old pro-creditor model. They caution, though, that their analysis has numerous limitations and that research on this topic should be continued and further discussed.

My article therefore engages in a second-best methodology: it builds on the pro-debtor shareholder-primacy model of corporate governance, which is widely viewed as maximizing value, by stressing that model under the circumstances of bankruptcy. This reveals two critical differences. First, creditors become the primary residual claimants of the firm, whereas shareholders are relegated to secondary residual claimant status. This changes the identity of the beneficiary of the ‘shareholder’ primacy model, whose goal is to favor the firm’s primary residual claimants. Second, the covenants that normally protect creditors become unenforceable in bankruptcy, suggesting the need for additional creditor protection.

Utilizing these differences, my article proposes and assesses a ‘creditor-primacy’ governance model for debtors in bankruptcy. It also examines how such a model could be applied to maximize bankruptcy value. My article recommends, for example, a threshold viability test that would require debtors that are unlikely to successfully reorganize, and therefore likely ultimately to liquidate, to be liquidated at the outset of a Chapter 11 case. That would save the considerable expenses of proceeding through bankruptcy, which can severely reduce creditor recovery. Such a test should also reduce agency costs and moral hazard. Furthermore, it should help to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy that leads to a disproportionately high number of supposedly reorganized debtors having to subsequently re-file Chapter 11 cases.

Steven L. Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law & Business at  Duke University School of Law; a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI); and Founding Director at Duke Global Financial Markets Center.

A version of this post was previously published in the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable blog, available here.

A link to the author's article is available here.