The Shellpot Bridge is a 536-foot swing bridge located on a rail freight bypass route around Wilmington, Delaware. When the bridge failed in 1994, Conrail, then the bridge’s owner, elected not to repair it due to declining freight volume. The State of Delaware reached agreement with the new...

This paper estimates the contribution of net saving for each of twelve motives to overall household saving in Japan using micro data from a Japanese government survey and finds that net saving for the retirement and precautionary motives, both of which are consistent with the life-cycle model,...

Using the real estate lending share of the bank's loan portfolio at the peak of the land-price bubble as an instrument for bank capital, we identify the impact of capital adequacy on the allocation of bank lending under the Basel regulatory framework. We find that, in Japan, a large loss of bank...

Current theoretical and empirical research suggests that small banks have a comparative advantage in processing soft information and delivering relationship lending. The most comprehensive analysis of this view found using US data that smaller SMEs borrow from smaller banks and smaller banks...

Can regulatory interventions alleviate financial crises? If so, which ones work? We draw inferences from the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s using a hand-gathered database of bank loans gathered from original sources. Our results indicate that whereas risk-based capital infusions in Japan...

This paper investigates whether the benefits of bank-borrower relationships differ depending on three factors identified in the theoretical literature: verifiability of information, bank size and complexity, and bank competition. We extend the current literature by analyzing how relationship...