Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis draws on new datasets of insolvency proceedings in two countries to examine corporate insolvency law in the United Kingdom (“U.K.”) from a comparative and quantitative empirical perspective. The primary focus is on pre-packaged administrations (“pre-packs”) carried out pursuant to Schedule B1 of the Insolvency Act 1986, as amended by the Enterprise Act 2002. In a pre-pack, an insolvent debtor company negotiates the sale of substantially all its assets on a going concern basis prior to initiating administration proceedings. Once administration proceedings are initiated, the pre-arranged deal is implemented and the sale is completed in short order. This thesis argues that pre-packs tend to give too much control to a debtor’s incumbent managers and secured creditors, and that this power imbalance often leads to worse outcomes for the debtor’s other stakeholders. This thesis begins by examining the key problems with pre-packs from a theoretical perspective, comparing them with similar processes in other countries, namely, sales under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act1 in Canada (“liquidating CCAAs”) and quick sales under Section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code2 (“363 sales”) in the United States (“U.S.”). In particular, this thesis argues that the speed, lack of transparency and limited stakeholder participation inherent in these processes create opportunities for secured creditors to influence the actions of an insolvent debtor’s senior managers, effectively aligning the interests of the secured creditors with those of management and leading to suboptimal outcomes for the debtor’s stakeholders as a group. The thesis examines originally collected quantitative data on pre-packs and liquidating CCAAs, as well as data on 363 sales collected by other scholars, to illustrate correlations between these processes and suboptimal outcomes for many stakeholders in insolvency. The thesis concludes by recommending reforms of the pre-pack, liquidating CCAA and 363 sales regimes to address the shortcomings of these processes and ensure that they will further, rather than undermine, the normative goals of insolvency law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".