As a result of deregulation, there was a dramatic shift during the 1980s in Japan away from bank debt financing towards public debt financing: in 1975, more than 90% of the corporate debt of public companies was bank debt; in 1992 it was less than 50%. This paper presents a theory of the choice...

During the financial crisis that started in 2007, the U.S. government has used a variety of tools to try to rehabilitate the U.S. banking industry. Many of those strategies were used also in Japan to combat its banking problems in the 1990s. There are also a surprising number of other...

During this decade the structure of corporate finance in Japan has changed dramatically. Japanese firms that once used bank debt as their prime source of financing now rely more heavily on the public capital markets. This trend was facilitated by the substantial deregulation of the Japanese...

We argue that the deregulation leading up to the Big Bang has played a major role in the current banking problems. This deregulation allowed large corporations to quickly switch from depending on banks to relying on capital market financing. We present evidence showing that large Japanese...

This paper explores the idea that financial distress is costly because free-rider problems and information asymmetries make it difficult for firms to renegotiate with their creditors in times of distress. We present evidence consistent with this view by showing Japanese firms with financial...

In this paper we provide a framework to study the aggregate dynamic behavior of an economy where individual units follow (S,s) policies. We characterize structural and stochastic heterogeneities that ensure convergence of the economy's aggregate to that of its frictionless counterpart, determine...

This paper assembles elements that are essential in forming an integral picture of the way a churning' economy functions and of the disruptions caused by transactional difficulties in labor and financial markets. We couch our analysis in a stochastic equilibrium model anchored with US evidence...

The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes, in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, the...

The representative agent framework has endowed macroeconomists with powerful microeconomic tools. Unfortunately, it has also blurred the distinction between statements that are valid at the individual level from those that apply to the aggregate. In this paper I argue that probability theory...

In this paper we build upon previous work on external economies in manufacturing [Caballero and Lyons (1989, 1990)] by providing new evidence helpful for discriminating between different types of externalities. We investigate four-digit level input-output relationships and find that, over...