Online Databases: Bankruptcy Database Project (BDP) at Harvard Law School
Here are three databases that will be of greatest interest to business and legal researchers. However, other researchers (e.g. journalists) might also find them useful.
The Bankruptcy Database Project [BDP] reports information on U.S. bankruptcy filings from open court records. We present two basic types of data: petitions filed and persons filed. We provide three analyses of our data: (1) filings under each chapter of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, (2) commercial and noncommercial filings, and (3) filings by legal entities and by individuals. The chapter is counted as of the date of filing and is not adjusted if the case is later converted to a different chapter.
The Administrative Office of U.S. Courts ("AOUSC") also releases statistics on the number of bankruptcy filings. The Bankruptcy Database Project data will differ from the AOUSC statistics. To the best of our knowledge, these differences result from several factors, including rules for counting reopened cases and joint petitions and for determining whether a case is a business case.
Learn more about the differences and why they happen here in a blog post by Professor Robert Lawless.
Automated Access to Court Electronic Records ("AACER") has provided the proprietary data that makes this web site possible. Everyone at the BDP at Harvard thanks AACER for its continued support and commitment to improving public policy through access to information.
The home page also provides two graphs that illustrate Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 filings during the past 6 months. Click the link below the graph and you can view a graph of filings during the past 12 months.
By selecting a date in the form below, BankrLaw will return the text of the United States Bankruptcy Code for any date between January 1, 1980, and today. The United States Bankruptcy Code is codified at title 11 of the United States Code and has been amended numerous times since its original enactment.
Web BRD is the most powerful business bankruptcy research tool on the web. Web BRD enables you to design and instantly execute an empirical study of large, public company bankruptcy cases in seconds -- in the most complete, accurate data available anywhere.
Web BRD is a byproduct of my empirical research on large, public company bankruptcies. Over a period of almost twenty years, I have collected the data from those studies -- more than 150 fields of data on each of more than 700 cases -- in the Bankruptcy Research Database.
The Web BRD contains the 20 most useful fields from the Bankruptcy Research Database. I make this data available free so that journalists, researchers, lawyers, judges, and the idly curious can have a bird's eye view of how the United States Bankruptcy Courts interact with large, public companies.
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