Personnel policies and strategies of Japanese companies have gathered special interest for a long time. But in a crisis like the burst of the bubble economy in the beginning of the nineties these principles are handled more and more in a flexible way. With a growing number of people in transfer...

The paper is a first step to tests the impact of bank-firm-relationships on corporate performance under changing economic conditions. Using a data set of standardized annual financial statements of 100 Japanese corporations all listed at the First Section of the Tokyo stock exchange, at the...

The paper presents an investigation of 72 Japanese manufacturing firms from five different industries with the focus on horizontal industrial groups (keiretsu). Data source was the Kaisha Database at the Science Center Berlin. The main findings are: Using the hexagon criterion to estimate the...

The paper analyzes the repeated interaction between a bank and a firm. A simple two period model is constructed, which explains several features of a credit relationship: It shows why bank finance is available for firms which cannot obtain bond financing, why credit contracts contain a .Material...

Der Blick auf Japan und die Beschäftigung mit japanischen Unternehmen war in der Vergangenheit oft gekennzeichnet durch eine unzureichende Erfassung japan-spezifischer Besonderheiten. Das Paper stellt auf der Grundlage der Kaisha-Datenbank Methodiken vor, mit denen die Strukturen japanischer...

The intensity of credit screening in a banking duopoly is endogenized under two different assumptions. In the first case each bank observes its competitior’s investment in information acquisition before making a credit offer. In the second case information acquisition and bidding in the credit...

The paper investigates the behaviour of banks with regard to the pricing of commercial short term loans over the period from 1975 until 1997. Due to the inclusion of interest rate quotes by banks located in east Germany in 1991 we distinguished between the subperiods from 1975 – 1989 and 1991...

The paper analyses the development of competition law in the United Kingdom by reference to four separate regimes, each with its own rules, scope of application and mode of application, though to some extent overlapping: (1) the common law doctrine of restraint of trade (affecting, primarily in...

The Japanese corporate system is assumed to contain an implicit insurance mechanism in various aspects. This paper proves the existence of risk sharing mechanism in supplier relations in a different way from the previous studies, using a unique data set of Japanese automotive parts suppliers....

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives in incumbent firms? Micro data suggest that there is heterogeneity across industries. Specifically, incumbent productivity growth and patenting is positively correlated with lagged greenfield foreign firm entry in technologically advanced...