For more than half a century, inventory investment has attracted wide attention as a major cause of short-term macroeconomic fluctuations, and the mechanisms involved have been the focus of many major studies. Yet microeconomists and business people familiar with corporate behavior have...

　　 For more than half a century, inventory investment has attracted wide attention as a major cause of short-term macroeconomic fluctuations, and the mechanisms involved have been the focus of many major studies. Yet microeconomists and business people familiar with corporate...

Observers of the formerly communist economies urge firms there to obtain funds from a relatively few sources. They note the problems the firms face: dysfunctional courts, markets, and statutes. Because these firms cannot rely on the courts to discipline managers, they predict that firms will do...

Although observers urge transitional economies to rely on banks rather than stock markets, in early twentieth-century Japan, large firms did not rely on debt. Instead, they sold stock. To mitigate agency slack, they sometimes recruited prominent investors to their boards. In this context, we use...

After "the Burst of the Bubble," Japan entered a long period of stagnation in 1990s, which observers call "the Lost Decade." This "Lost Decade" ended with "the Financial Crisis," after which the Koizumi Cabinet aggressively pursued a policy designed to reduce the amount of "bad loans" held by...

The Japanese government, in collaboration with local governments, guarantees the credit of small businesses. During the last decade, it spent annually an average of 2 billion US dollars under these programs. In addition, during the last stage of the Japan's "financial crisis" (Oct. 1998-Mar....

Alexander Gerschenkron argued that banks facilitate growth in "backward" countries, and modern theorists sometimes similarly claim that banks can promote growth by reducing informational asymmetries and improving the allocation of funds. Japan has played a part in these debates. In early...

This paper identifies some of the principal problems in Japanese official economic statistics. It discusses how the government currently generates those numbers, and how it might begin to collect more helpful material. It invites researchers and members of the Japanese government to join in this...

Many observers describe the last 20 years of the Japanese economy as "the Two Lost Decades". Many also discuss the "bad loans" in the banking sector and the "insufficient" and "delayed" "disposal of the bad loans." They urge policies that will accelerate that disposition. Observers have also...