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...

Do bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on their non-bankrupt competitors? We propose and analyze a collateral channel in which a firm's bankruptcy reduces collateral values of other industry participants, thereby increasing the cost of external debt finance industry wide. To identify...

In this paper, we propose a bank-based explanation for the decade-long Japanese slowdown following the asset price collapse in the early 1990s. We start with the well-known observation that most large Japanese banks were only able to comply with capital standards because regulators were lax in...

Credit market freezes in which debt issuance declines dramatically and market liquidity evaporates are typically observed during financial crises. In the financial crisis of 2008-09, the structured credit market froze, issuance of corporate bonds declined, and secondary credit markets became...

Illiquidity in short-term credit markets during the financial crisis might have severely curtailed the supply of non-bank consumer credit. Using a new data set linking every car sold in the United States to the credit supplier involved in each transaction, we find that the collapse of the...

This paper identifies a new channel through which bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on non-bankrupt peers. The bankruptcy and liquidation of a retail chain weakens the economies of agglomeration in any given local area, reducing the attractiveness of retail centers for remaining...