This paper investigates the effect of bankruptcy announcements on the equity value of the bankrupt firm's competitors. On average, bankruptcy announcements decrease the value of a value-weighted portfolio of competitors by 1%. This negative effect is significantly larger for highly levered industries and industries where the unconditional stock returns of the nonbankrupt and bankrupt firms are highly correlated; the effect is significantly positive for highly concentrated industries with low leverage, suggesting that in such industries competitors benefit from the difficulties of the bankrupt firm.

There is a significant foreign influence on the risk premium for U.S. assets. Using a bivariate GARCH-in-mean process, we find that the conditional expected excess return on U.S. stocks is positively related to the conditional covariance of the return of these stocks with the return on a foreign index but is not related to its own conditional variance. Further, we are unable to reject the international version of the CAPM. We present evidence for different model specifications, multiple-day returns, and alternative proxies for foreign stock returns.