Employing data from a unique firm survey, this article examines small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing in Japan during the global financial crisis. The major findings of the article are two-fold. First, in terms of credit availability, loans extended by main banks were the “first...

Using a unique dataset of non-listed firms that identifies the banks the firms transact with, we examine the effects of the largest-ever bank merger in Japan, that between Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (BTM) and UFJ Bank (UFJ) in 2005. We focus on how the merger affected firms through their firm-bank...

In this paper, we investigate whether a natural selection works for firm exit after a massive natural disaster. By using a unique data set of more than 84,000 firms after the Great Tohoku Earthquake, we examine the impact of firm efficiency on firm bankruptcy both inside and outside the...

A firm’s choice of location is very important because it reveals the firm’s dynamics. Using a unique firm-level data set, we examine whether and how the presence of incumbent transaction partners (i.e., suppliers, customers, and lender banks) affects this choice. To this end, we focus on...