Market Discipline and Deposit Insurance Reform in Japan

On April 1, 2002, the Japanese government lifted a blanket guarantee of all deposits and began limiting the coverage of time deposits. This paper uses this deposit insurance reform as a natural experiment to investigate the relationship between deposit insurance coverage and market discipline. I find that the reform raised the sensitivity of interest rates on deposits, and that of deposit quantity to default risk. In addition, the interest rate differentials between partially insured large time deposits and fully insured ordinary deposits increased for risky banks. These results suggest that the deposit insurance reform enhanced market discipline in Japan. I also find that too-big-to-fail (TBTF) policy became a more important determinant of interest rates and deposit allocation after the reform, thereby partially offsetting the positive effects of the deposit insurance reform on overall market discipline.