was characterized as a bank-centered economy, but the banking system did not function well in the 1990's. Responding to …

-firm lending data. We decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990 to 2010 into bank, firm, industry, and common shocks … developing a new methodology to separate firms' credit shocks from loan supply shocks, using a vast sample of matched bank … economy, which creates a role for granular shocks, as in Gabaix (2011). As a result, idiosyncratic bank shocks - movements in …

approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of … ignores differences in bank product quality and design, as well as the attractiveness of innovations. We measure competition … on the lending markets in the five major EU countries as well as, for comparison, the UK, the US and Japan. Bearing the …