On Bankruptcy Procedures and the Valuation of Corporate Securities

This paper extends the contingent claims analysis of Black-Scholes-Merton-Cox to account for the existence of a court-supervised bankruptcy procedure that is exclusively based on the time spent by the firm in distress. I provide some distribution-free results and analytical formulae that are very useful for pricing corporate securities. I highlight a number of price effects of the bankruptcy procedure and show, for instance, that the credit spreads can decrease or increase with respect to the grace delay depending on the subordination feature of the corporate debt. Senior creditors should in turn worry about the effective enforceability of their safety covenant. Numerical experiments suggest that any effort to reinforce a safety covenant ex ante may be swept quite easily by a grace delay granted by a Court ex post. Finally, I discuss the portfolio management of corporate securities when portfolios are internationally diversified and I show how a portfolio manager can extend the initial one-country setting to a multi-country setting with different bankruptcy codes.