Under the financial turbulence, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) had launched a series of unprecedented monetary policies in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The conventional monetary policies were not effective under liquidity trap. However, some unconventional monetary policies, including zero...

Empirical studies in corporate finance have long been focused on the role of banks in reducing the costs of financial distress. The environment and events in Japan provide a "natural experiment" that allows such empirical studies. The number of bankruptcies steadily increased throughout the...

When a borrower faces an informational hold-up problem, deteriorating bank health might reduce a borrower's credit availability. However, a bank with an impaired balance sheet might attempt to "gamble for resurrection" and hence increase risky lending to "zombie" firms. The purpose of this paper...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why the choice of invoice currency under exchange rate uncertainty depends not only on expectations but also on history. The analysis is motivated by the fact that the U.S. dollar has historically been the dominant vehicle currency in developing...

A "shock therapy" might have different impacts between large and small firms. In this paper, we focus on the clients of two large failed Japanese banks - the Long-term Credit Bank of Japan (LTCB) and the Nippon Credit Bank (NCB). We first show that subsequent events after the bank failures...