Our paper contributes to several strands of the literature. First, several articles examine the costsand benefits of reorganization procedures such as Chapter 11 (e.g., Baird (1986); Aghion et al.(1992); Bradley and Rosenzweig (1992); Hotchkiss (1995); Gilson (1997); Bris et al. (2006)), whileothers consider frictions that may exist in distressed liquidations (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny (1992);Pulvino (1998, 1999); Strömberg (2000); Thorburn (2000); Campbell et al. (2011)). However, thisliterature has typically ignored any spillover effects of bankruptcy on non-bankrupt firms. This paper shows that these externalities are large enough to be a first-order consideration in assessing the costsand benefits of the two bankruptcy regimes.