Journal Article Game Shows and Economic Behavior: Risk-Taking on “Card Sharks” Get access Robert Gertner Robert Gertner University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 108, Issue 2, May 1993, Pages 507–521, https://doi.org/10.2307/2118342 Published: 01 May 1993

This paper analyzes the ways in which financially distressed firms try to avoid bankruptcy through public and private debt restructurings, asset sales, mergers, and capital expenditure reductions. Our main finding is that a firm's debt structure affects the way financially distressed firms restructure. The combination of secured private debt and numerous public debt issues seems to impede out-of-court restructurings and increases the probability of a Chapter 11 filing. In addition, we find that, while asset sales are a way of avoiding Chapter 11, they are limited by industry factors: firms in distressed and highly leveraged industries are less prone to sell assets.

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of internal versus external capital allocation. We focus primarily on comparing an internal capital market with bank lending. While both represent centralized forms of financing, in the former case the financing is owner-provided, while in the latter case it is not. We argue that the ownership aspect of internal capital allocation has three important consequences: (1) it leads to more monitoring than bank lending; (2) it reduces managers' entrepreneurial incentives; and (3) it makes it easier to efficiently redeploy the assets of projects that are performing poorly under existing management.