We trace Japanese firms’ behavior over the last decades using aggregate corporate balance sheet data. Financial health of Japanese corporate sector has improved and firms paid back significant amount of debt and rebuilt their liquidity buffers. They also expanded abroad while the pace of...

Based on a panel data set of Japanese manufacturing firms in research-intensive industries, we investigate quantitatively the extent to which debt outstandings in the 90s affected the firm's R&D activities. We find that massive debt outstandings had significantly negative effect on R&D...