Everyone surely hopes that zombies will remain confined to the growing list of horror movies. But unless we shut them down, insolvent firms can become economic zombies that suffocate innovation and growth.
As the COVID pandemic continues, policymakers will face some difficult decisions. Many businesses are coming under increasingly severe financial stress. Some, like dry-cleaning establishments that rely on laundering clothing for office workers, have limited prospects even after the pandemic subsides. But there are others that have a bright post-COVID future if they can hold on long enough. Without a way to distinguish these two groups, we face an unpleasant choice of either creating zombies or allowing viable firms to perish.
In our view, the solution to this problem is to reinforce and modify the bankruptcy process. This means ensuring that there are sufficient resources to restructure the debts of those whose expected future profits exceed their liquidation value, while allowing the remainder to close. In the case of large corporations, we can make use of Chapter 11. For smaller firms, if it is not already too late, we need a low-cost mechanism more tailored to their needs.
In the remainder of this post, we discuss these two related issues: zombie firms and the use of bankruptcy procedures to identify and sustain viable firms.
For at least the past 30 years, the rate of U.S. business formation has been falling and the average age of existing firms has been rising. Since 2000, two other things have happened: productivity growth has slowed, while many skilled jobs have disappeared. Startups are thought be a key source of innovation in the economy and of net job creation. At the same time, as Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction suggests, the death of old firms is a critical part of the renewal process. So, the declining trend of entry and exit has people worried that U.S. business dynamism is ebbing (see our earlier post).
How concerned should we be? To be completely honest, we don’t really know; at least, not yet. But the answer is important, because it can help orient the U.S. economic policy framework to support the creation of successful businesses that generate high-quality jobs. In this post, we summarize some new research aimed at helping us understand what the decline in business formation really means. Does it signal a fall in the number of successful firms that contribute substantially to business value added, productivity, and employment? Or, is it a decline in the formation of firms that never exceed a tiny scale and have little impact on the broader economy?
