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Abstract:
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In a bankruptcy situation, not all claimants are affected in the same
way. In particular, some depositors may enter into a situation of personal
bankruptcy if they lose part of their investments. Events of this kind may
lead to a social catastrophe. We propose discrimination among the claimants
as a possible solution. A fact considered in the American bankruptcy law
(among others) that establishes some discrimination on the claimants, or the
Santander Bank that in the Madoff’s case reimbursed only the deposits to
its particular customers. Moreover, the necessity of discriminating has already
been mentioned in different contexts by Young (1988), Bossert (1995),
Thomson (2003) and Pulido et al. (2002, 2007), for instance. In this paper,
we take a bankruptcy solution as the reference point. Given this initial
allocation, we make transfers from richer to poorer with the purpose of distributing
not only the personal incurred losses as evenly as possible but also
the transfers in a progressive way. The agents are divided into two groups
depending on their personal monetary value (wealth, net-income, GDP or
any other characteristic). Then, we impose a set of Axioms that bound the
maximal transfer that each net-contributor can make and each net-receiver
can obtain. Finally, we define a value discriminant solution, and we characterize
it by means of the Lorenz criterion. Endogenous convex combinations
between solutions are also considered.
Keywords: Bankruptcy, Discrimination, Compensation, Rules
JEL classification: C71, D63, D71. |
