Regional differences in banking integration determined how Japan s Great Recession after 1990 spread across the country. We explain these differences with the emergence of silk reeling as the main export industry after Japan s opening to trade in the 19th century. The silk-exporting prefectures...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

We exploit the natural experiment of Japan's opening to international trade to examine how comparative advantage can shape a country's long-run path towards financial development. In the late 19th century, many of Japan's prefectures had a natural comparative advantage in silk reeling. Producing...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan’s Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

During Japan's ‘Lost Decade', reallocation of credit through the internal capital markets of country-wide banks mitigated the real effects from the bank liqudity shock in prefectures with many bank-dependent SMEs. We document that the regional fragmentation of banking markets in Japan goes...