This paper examines the movements of the Distance to Default (DD), a market-based measure of corporate default risk, of eight failed Japanese banks in order to evaluate the predictive power of the DD measure for bank failures. The DD became smaller in anticipation of failure in many cases. The...

This paper investigates how financial troubles among Japanese banks in the second half of the 1990s were viewed by the market. Two indicators, the Japan premium and the stock price index of the banking sector in Tokyo, were examined. Econometric tests were employed to see whether different kinds...

In the late 1990s, several large Japanese banks failed for the first time in its postwar history. As the financial environment was deteriorating further, several remaining banks decided to merge among themselves, presumably, to make their operations more efficient to avoid failures. This paper...

This paper examines how the risk based capital standards, the so-called Basle Accord between 1990 and 1993. As the Japanese stock prices fell, banks' latent capital gains, which are part of tier II capital, became smaller. Empirical findings are consistent with a view that banks with lower...