Did specialised courts affect the frequency of business bankruptcy petitions in Spain?

Spanish small businesses rarely file for bankruptcy, and Spanish bankruptcy rates are abnormally small. The historical inadequacy of the Spanish insolvency system has led most enterprises to rely on the de facto alternative mortgage system and to overinvest in fixed tangible assets: a distortion that may trigger significant adverse effects, for instance on the enabling environment of novel entrepreneurship. The reform of the bankruptcy law that took place in Spain some 10 years in order to modernise the insolvency system involved, as a main novelty, the establishment of specialised commercial courts (Juzgados de lo Mercantil). Since the net benefits of specialised judicial functions are in principle ambiguous, we study empirically whether these new bodies had any impact, over and above the economic crisis, on the use of the bankruptcy system. Exploiting the staggered timing of the new courts geography, we estimate an endogenous treatment model with a binary policy variable which allows to measure the effect of the reform on bankruptcy rates. The results support the view that the new bankruptcy law took the right path, but the size of the estimated parameters call for further policy efforts in that direction.