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The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the volatility of stock prices in the days surrounding the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process predicts a firm’s likelihood to successfully restructure and emerge from bankruptcy.

The authors use a sample of Chapter 11 cases between 1980 and 2016 that have available stock price data surrounding the bankruptcy filing dates. Following Goyal and Wang (2013), the KMV–Merton model is utilized to estimate the probability that a firm successfully emerges from its restructuring process. In order to interpret the market’s assessment about a firm, the authors use the analogy of a European call option to derive the assessment of the firm’s prospects as the probability that it will emerge from bankruptcy. This estimated probability of emergence is compared to actual outcomes of bankruptcy cases and tested for significance using various regression techniques.

This study exploits the information found in stock prices surrounding the bankruptcy process and finds that volatility after, but not before, filing for bankruptcy significantly predicts a firm’s likelihood to emerge. In addition, the market-based probability of emergence has better predictive power on the recovery rates of unsecured creditors than measures based on financial statements.

Predictors of bankruptcy have been extensively studied by scholars over the decades, with early studies focusing on accounting-based measures and recent studies incorporating market-driven variables. However, in recent years, studies have begun to assess bankrupt firms’ ability to reorganize and successfully emerge from bankruptcy. This study contributes to the recent literature investigating market-based predictors of successful emergence.

This chapter develops a no-arbitrage, futures equilibrium cost-of-carry model to demonstrate that the existence of cointegration between spot and futures prices in the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) crude oil market depends crucially on the time-series properties of the underlying model. In marked contrast to previous studies, the futures equilibrium model utilizes information contained in both the quality delivery option and convenience yield as a timing delivery option in the NYMEX contract. Econometric tests of the speculative efficiency hypothesis (also termed the “unbiasedness hypothesis”) are developed and common tests of this hypothesis examined. The empirical results overwhelming support the hypotheses that the NYMEX future price is an unbiased predictor of future spot prices and that no-arbitrage opportunities are available. The results also demonstrate why common tests of the speculative efficiency hypothesis and simple arbitrage models often reject one or both of these hypotheses.