In this paper, we document a practice in the processes of loan screenings and term settings by regional financial institutions and the extent of the use of qualitative information in these processes based upon the data collected by our originally -designed questionnaire survey on financial...

The question of whether more competition among banks increases relationship banking, which is predicted to improve credit availability for informationally opaque firms in theory, is a controversial issue in the banking literature. By using firm-level survey data in Japan, this paper provides...

We empirically examine the impact of bank consolidation on bank acquisition of soft information about borrowers. Using a dataset of small business financing, we find that mergers of small banks have a negative impact on soft information acquisition, whereas mergers of large banks have no impact....

What is driving the remarkable increase over the last decade in the propensity of patents to cite academic science? Does this trend indicate that stronger knowledge spillovers from academia have helped power the surge in innovative activity in the U.S. in the 1990s? This paper seeks to shed...

In this paper, using firm-level cross-sectional data in the US, we report that interest rates on loans extended by inside banks are significantly lower than those on loans extended by outside banks for younger firms in concentrated loan markets, while such loan rate differences are not clearly...

In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of evolving networks of successful R&D collaborations in the IT industry (consisting of firms that obtained patents in the technological category of computers and communication) in the U.S. between 1985 and 1995. We first show that the R&D network...

In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of evolving networks of successful R&D collaborations in the IT industry (consisting of firms that obtained patents in the technological category of computers and communication) in the U.S. between 1985 and 1995. We first show that the R&D network...

This paper focuses on the drastic increase observed in the Japanese male suicide rate in the late 1990s and early 2000s and confirms unemployment and personal bankruptcy to be the associated socioeconomic factors behind the male suicide variation. Personal bankruptcy is also confirmed to be...

This paper analyzes how learning a borrower's creditworthiness, from past lending decision by a rival bank that is publicly observable through private or public credit reporting systems, affects the performance of subsequent lending competitions. Our analysis of twicerepeated lending...