In this paper, we explore the role of the legal system in economic development, focusing on its relationship to the role of private mechanisms in contract enforcement. We use long-term prefecture-level panel data that cover the early stages of industrialization and urbanization in Japan. We...

In this paper I describe the outline of the historical evolution of corporate governance in Japan, and intend to derive some insights on its future. While two alternative systems, the holding company-based system and the bank-based system were available in the 1920s, the former started to...

More than forty years ago, Kato[1957] posed the organ bank hypothesis. Namely, he stressed that in prewar Japan, many of the banks were tightly connected with certain industrial companies, and those banks loosely gave loans to the connected companies, which eventually resulted in the Showa...

This paper presents an empirical framework to analyze institutional changes, and applies it to the evolution of several economic institutions in Japan, specifically main banking system and long- term employment. Ideas of evolutionary biology and organizational ecology are applied to the...

This paper examines the role of the merchant coalition (kabu nakama) in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century in Japan, from the standpoint of Historical Institutional Analysis (Greif[1997, 1998]). Quantitative economic history literature has made clear that market-based...

This paper explores how the Bank of Japan (BOJ) dealt with the trade-off between stability of the financial system and the moral hazard of banks in pre-war Japan. The BOJ concentrated Lender of Last Resort (LLR) loans with those banks that had an established transaction relationship with the...

This paper examines how the close ties between banks and non-banking firms-the so-called "organ bank" relationship in Japanese banking literature-declined through bank failures and banking consolidations in pre-war Japan. With a unique dataset compiled from 1,007 Japanese banks that were doing...

Until early 1960's, the Japanese government controlled import by means of foreign exchange allocation system. Rents generated and allocated by the foreign exchange allocation system provided the government with a powerful tool for industrial policy, although there also existed a possibility that...

In prewar Japan, many banks were controlled by industrial companies through capital and personal relationships. Those banks are called "organ banks" (kikan ginko). Organ banks engaged in unsound lending to their related companies, which gave damage to the banks' financial conditions, and...

Recent studies have established that the Japanese stock market was quite large in the pre-war period, and played an important role in financing the economic development. The pre-war stock market in Japan, however, did not achieve its size and status quickly. Indeed, the market capitalization...