Observers of modern transitional economies urge firms there to ignore stock markets. Stock markets simply will not work in such environments, they explain. Firms should instead rely on debt finance, particularly bank debt. Only then will they be able to keep principal-agent (i.e.,...

Although reformers often claim Japanese firms appoint inefficiently few outside directors, the logic of market competition suggests otherwise. Given the competitive product, service, and capital markets in Japan, the firms that survive should disproportionately be firms that tend to appoint...

In 1985, Demsetz and Lehn argued both that the optimal corporate ownership structure was firm-specific, and that market competition would drive firms toward that optimum. Because ownership was endogenous to expected performance, any regression of profitability on ownership patterns would yield...

Despite the many economic studies documenting the problems governments face in trying to control or guide economic growth, the literature on postwar Japan posits an exception: during the first three years after World War II, the Japanese government (working with the Allied occupation)...

Observers routinely claim that the Japanese government of the high-growth 1960s and 1970s rationed and ultimately directed credit. It barred domestic competitors to banks, insulated the domestic capital market from international competitive pressure, and capped loan interest rates. In the...

Firms in modern developed economies can choose to borrow from banks or from trade partners. Using first-difference and difference-in-differences regressions on Japanese manufacturing data, we explore the way they make that choice. Whether small or large, they do borrow from their trade partners...

Most of what we collectively think we know about the Japanese economy is urban legend. In fact -- * The keiretsu do not exist, and never did. An entrepreneurial "research institute" in the 1950s created the rosters to sell to Marxist economists looking for the "monopoly capital" that their...

In a series of pathbreaking articles, Sylla argues that successful economies experience "financial revolutions" before they undergo their periods of rapid growth. In turn, governments generate these revolutions by putting public finance in order, and thereby giving private investors the...

Prepared for a forthcoming book on the distribution sector in Japan, this essay introduces the distribution network in the apparel industry. We note the varying patterns of cross-market contracting and intra-firm organization in the industry, and trace the economizing logic involved. More...

In several fields, modern academics trumpet the contingency of social science and the indeterminacy of institutional structures. The Japanese experience during the first half of the 20th century, however, instead tracks what much-derided chauvinists have claimed all along: modern legal...