Title: Financial restructuring of firms under weak bankruptcy laws - an Indian experience

Authors: Smita Mazumdar; Anupam Rastogi

Addresses: School of Business Management, NMIMS, Mumbai, India ' School of Business Management, NMIMS, Mumbai, India

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates behaviour of firms with respect to capital utilisation under a weak insolvency and bankruptcy law using Indian corporate data over a period of 2000-2014. It suggests that firms resorted to higher borrowings after being subjected to restructuring under the corporate debt restructuring mechanism - an informal arrangement supported by the Reserve Bank of India. While firms managed to obtain more debt from lenders thereby signalling the possibility of recovery, we do not find any improvement in firm profitability post financial restructuring. This indicates that lenders in countries with weak insolvency regime postpone the day of reckoning. The empirical evidence corroborates the theory of agency cost of debt and the signalling hypothesis in the change in capital structure of firms.

Keywords: financial restructuring; corporate debt restructuring; CDR; capital structure; leverage; Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code; India.

DOI: 10.1504/AAJFA.2021.117723

Afro-Asian Journal of Finance and Accounting, 2021 Vol.11 No.4, pp.518 - 536

Received: 11 Apr 2018
Accepted: 27 Oct 2018
Published online: 23 Sep 2021 *

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