Gauthier Vandenbossche
Gauthier Vandenbossche (1997) is a PhD candidate and academic assistant at the Faculty of Law and Criminology (Department of Interdisciplinary Study of Law, Private Law and Business Law and Financial Law Institute) and the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (Department of Accounting, Corporate Finance and Taxation) at Ghent University. He is a teaching assistant for the law courses in the Business Administration programme (in particular “Inleiding tot het recht” and “Belastingstrategie”).
Gauthier graduated summa cum laude as Master of Science in Business Administration (Taxation) in 2020, writing his thesis about the tax treatment of income from the transfer of copyrights (“Auteursrechten: een fiscale analyse").
Gauthier Vandenbossche has a strong interest in law and its intersection with business economics. Gauthier is preparing a doctoral dissertation in the area of insolvency law. He presented his research at the INSOL Europe Academic Conference (Dublin, 2022), INSOL Europe Annual Congress (Dublin, 2022), PhD workshop on European/International Insolvency Law (Leiden, 2022, third prize), PhD workshop on law reform in secured transactions and insolvency proceedings (Antwerp, 2022), INSOL Europe Academic Conference (Dubrovnik, 2022) and YANIL research workshop on restructuring and insolvency law (Amsterdam).
Gauthier publishes within the field of insolvency law, business law and tax law. He is also a frequent speaker at seminars. He also possesses extensive knowledge of the Belgian copyright tax regime, including income that authors obtain from the transfer or licensing of copyrights.
His PhD research
Optimising the scope of application of insolvency procedures
The main objective of the research project "Optimising the scope of insolvency proceedings" is to examine whether currently the right entities (natural and legal persons) end up in the right insolvency proceedings and to what extent optimisations are possible. The research project consists of several articles.
The first article focuses on personal bankruptcy proceedings, which are increasingly fulfilling an economic function aimed at rehabilitating the debtor. The idea of a fresh start and a second chance, including an early discharge of residual debts, is an important illustration of this. Despite the fact that this development can be observed in all personal insolvency proceedings, both for entrepreneurs and consumers, debt discharge used to be considered easier to justify and more readily granted to entrepreneurs (traders) than to non-entrepreneurs. The question arises as to whether EU Member States should operate separate discharge systems for entrepreneurs and consumers and whether this is justified in relation to their purpose. This research paper, "Natural person ltd.: Towards a unified discharge regime for entrepreneurs and consumers", on personal insolvency proceedings was published in the International Insolvency Review in 2023.
A second paper focuses on the costs of bankruptcy cases closed for lack of assets ('empty estates'). The trustee in bankruptcy plays a central role in these proceedings. It is argued that empty estate-bankruptcy proceedings cost the state a lot of money. In bankruptcies where the assets are not sufficient to pay the trustee's fees, the trustee is entitled to a lump sum fee of 1,215.51 euros from Belgian state instead of from the estate. The Time Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC) economic costing model can be used to calculate the actual cost of the workload and time spent by the trustee in bankruptcy proceedings. This should make it possible to examine the added value of the trustee in a bankruptcy file that is closed for lack of assets.
A third paper examines the performance of (amicable) repayment plans. While in the vast majority of collective debt arrangements an amicable repayment plan is reached, there is very little empirical research on the extent to which these arrangements achieve their objective.
Gauthier Vandenbossche’s research is financed by the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and the Faculty of Law and Criminology, and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Bertel De Groote and Prof. Dr. Diederik Bruloot. His project is running from 2020 to 2026.