We formulate the “High Liquidity Creation Hypothesis” (HLCH) that a proliferation in the core activity of bank liquidity creation increases failure probability. We test the HLCH in the context of Russian banking, which provides a natural field experiment due to numerous failures experienced...

I explore the effect of a bank's failure on its client firms using the 1998 bankruptcy of a middle-sized Estonian bank.I compare the performance of firms receiving credit from the bankrupt bank to that of a randomly selected set of firms between 1996 and 2000.I find the client firms to be less...