Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemThe Distinctive Features of Women in the Australian Bankruptcy System: An Empirical Study(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2019)According to data published by Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA), Australian women and men offer strikingly similar reasons for their entry into bankruptcy. Yet a more detailed analysis of AFSA’s data indicates that women and men often go bankrupt in very different social and economic circumstances. This empirical study draws upon a unique dataset, obtained from AFSA, containing the de-identified records of more than 28,000 individuals. It also draws upon a series of focus groups with the staff of three nonprofit organisations, including financial counsellors and consumer solicitors. It finds that, in general, women in bankruptcy are likely to be economically disadvantaged, relative to men, as measured by income, access to wages, reliance on government benefits, real estate ownership and utilities debt. It also finds that women in bankruptcy are much more likely than men to be single with dependants and that these women experience a greater degree of gendered disadvantage than other women in the bankruptcy system.
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ItemMore to Lose: The Attributes of Involuntary Bankruptcy(WILEY, 2019-03)While the majority of those who declare bankruptcy do so voluntarily, a significant proportion are forced into bankruptcy as a result of legal action. This paper interrogates data obtained from the Australian Financial Security Authority to explore the attributes of debtors who go bankrupt involuntarily. Based on this analysis, the authors hypothesise that people who go bankrupt involuntarily are those who have more to lose by going bankrupt – such as a family home, a business venture or a managerial or professional occupation – meaning that they are more likely to resist bankruptcy until they are forced into it by their creditors.
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ItemThe Hidden Dimension of Business Bankruptcy in Australia(Thomson Reuters, 2018)This study is the first empirically based analysis of business bankruptcy to be conducted in Australia. It aims to identify key differences between debtors who declare business bankruptcy and those who declare non-business or “personal” bankruptcy, and to explore the extent to which there might be a “hidden” population of business debtors among those formally identified as personal debtors. This question is significant in light of the Commonwealth Government’s imminent changes to bankruptcy law, which will reduce the period of bankruptcy from three years to one in a bid to promote entrepreneurship. Some commentators suggest that these reforms should only apply to business debtors. However the authors find strong evidence that there are clusters of “personal” debtors whose bankruptcies are in fact wholly or partly business-related. The authors conclude that any changes to the bankruptcy regime should apply to all debtors. Given the difficulty of drawing sharp distinctions between business and personal bankruptcy, this is both more practical and more desirable, as a matter of public policy.