This paper examines panel evidence concerning the role of financial development in economic growth. I decompose the well-documented relationship between financial development and growth to examine whether financial development affects growth solely through its contribution to growth in factor...

This paper reviews the Japanese experience with “put guarantees” recently offered in the sale of several failed banks. These guarantees, meant to address information asymmetry problems, are shown to create moral hazard problems of their own. In particular, the guarantees make acquiring banks...

The Japanese "main bank" relationship, under which a bank holds equity in a firm and plays a leading role in its decision-making and financing, may leave a firm dependent on its main bank for financing due its information advantage over other potential lenders. While alternative sources of...

This paper examines the evidence in bank equity markets concerning bank regulatory policies in Japan over the turbulent 1995-1998 period. We find that investors grouped banks according to regulatory status in assessing whether a bank was currently treated as "too-big-to-fail." when a failure of...

The Japanese "main bank" relationship, under which a bank holds equity in a firm and plays a leading role in its decision-making and financing, may leave a firm dependent on its main bank for financing due its information advantage over other potential lenders. While alternative sources of...

This paper compares the performance of a convoy banking system, similar to that which prevailed in Japan, to a fixed-premium deposit insurance regime. Under this system, failed banks are merged with healthy banks, rather than closed, so that the banking system itself provides the safety net for...

This paper develops an open-economy version of the Bernanke-Blinder model which indicates that sterilization efforts through increases in reserve requirements will have limited impact if viable financial alternatives to the commercial banking sector exists. We then examine the capital inflow...

We examine foreign intermediation activity in Japan during the so-called quot;lost decadequot; of the 1990s, contrasting the behavior of lending by foreign commercial banks and underwriting activity by foreign investment banks over that period. Foreign bank lending is shown to be sensitive to...

We examine the impact of foreign underwriting activity using issue-level data in the Japanese quot;Samuraiquot; and euro-yen bond markets. We find that firms in these markets choosing Japanese underwriters over their foreign counterparts tend to be Japanese, riskier, smaller, seasoned, and...