Do rights offerings reduce bargaining complexity in Chapter 11?
This paper investigates the role of rights offerings in U.S. Chapter 11 reorganizations as a new market-based mechanism for mitigating bargaining frictions. Using novel hand-collected data, I document three facts: (i) over the past two decades, rights offerings financed 35% of large bankruptcies, (ii) they are predominantly proposed and underwritten by hedge funds, and (iii) their occurrence is highly correlated with stock market performance. In an instrumental variable…