Employing data from a unique firm survey, this article examines small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing in Japan during the global financial crisis. The major findings of the article are two-fold. First, in terms of credit availability, loans extended by main banks were the “first...

Using a unique dataset of non-listed firms that identifies the banks the firms transact with, we examine the effects of the largest-ever bank merger in Japan, that between Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (BTM) and UFJ Bank (UFJ) in 2005. We focus on how the merger affected firms through their firm-bank...