Search

We present evidence that government-controlled banks (GCBs) significantly increased their lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) whose main bank was a large bank in the 2007-09 financial crisis. Further analyses show that both the weak relationship between large banks and SMEs and the crowding out due to the loan demand surge among large corporations facing the securities market paralysis contributed to this phenomenon. The mixed Cournot oligopoly model, including a GCB, shows that the above finding regarding the weak relationship is consistent with the welfare maximization by a GCB rather than its own profit maximization.

This paper estimates inside bank premiums arising from relationship banking and identifies the primary mechanism causing them among competing extant theories. Our empirical results using a dataset that is primarily based on a survey that we designed show that inside bank premiums are economically significant with an average of 68–71 basis points for short-term loans. The subsample regressions show that these premiums are more likely to result from the provision of implicit insurance or flexibility in renegotiation by the inside bank and that they are more significant for firms whose inside banks are larger, those with a lower capital to asset ratio, or those in more concentrated loan markets.

We find empirical evidence that pre-initial public offering (IPO) relationships with commercial banks through lending and investment via their venture capital subsidiaries significantly reduce IPO underpricing in Japan. This findings suggest that a pre-IPO banking relationship certifies the low risk of an IPO firm. Given the fact that institutional investors are a minority in the allocation of IPO stocks in Japan, this effect is expected to come mainly from reducing either the investors' winner's curse or the signaling incentive of IPO firms, rather than from the reduction in information rent for institutional investors participating in the book-building process.

We present a structural estimation of regionally heterogeneous demand elasticity and the degree of competition in Japanese local loan markets under prolonged monetary easing. Our estimates show that lending competition intensifies in markets where banks hold more slack liquidity caused by monetary easing, and where loan demand is less elastic against lowering interest rates due to a rapidly aging population. We also find evidence for “search-for-yield”, i.e., banks in more competitive markets are driven to extend riskier loans.

We reexamine the differences in the profitability distributions of listed companies in the United States and Japan. To control for cross-country differences in the industrial composition, firm size, and firm age distribution, we construct a matched sample using Mahalanobis nearest neighbor matching with respect to these factors. The matched sample supports the finding of existing studies that the median and the standard deviation of profitability are significantly higher in the United States than in Japan. Our matched panel data indicate that this difference arises from both larger firm heterogeneity and more intensive risk-taking in the United States. The sector-by-sector analysis shows that the standard deviation gap is larger in the sectors with more intensive churning in asset-size ranking.

We empirically examine the impact of bank consolidation on bankers' acquisition of soft information about borrowers. Using a dataset of small businesses, we find that bank mergers have a negative impact on soft information acquisition by small banks while those by large banks have no impact. We also find that large banks do not acquire substantial soft information irrespective of merger experiences. Detailed analyses of the post-merger organizational restructuring show that the measures of an increase in organizational complexity upon a merger have a negative and significant impact on soft information acquisition by small banks, while the measures of cost-cut do not have any significant impact. These results imply that the increase in organizational complexity by bank mergers hindered soft information acquisition, which is consistent with Stein's prediction [2002, J. Fin.] on the comparative advantage of simple and flat organizations in acquiring and processing soft information.

In this paper, I present statistical evidence of the impact of lending competition on credit availability for new firms. A discrete-time duration analysis with respect to the years from the start-up to the first loan approval by a commercial bank or a cooperative bank, which is collected from survey data in Japan, shows that the higher price cost margin (PCM) of banks, which reflects the existence of a quasi-rent for a bank, improves the credit availability for younger firms. Additional analysis to detect the regional determinants of the PCM of banks shows that the share of larger banks in each local credit market has a negative and significant impact on the PCM. In light of the existing empirical finding that smaller banks are more likely to provide relationship banking, these findings provide indirect evidence for the hypothesis that the intensity of relationship banking in each local credit market increases the PCM and this encourages banks to extend a loan to new firms so that they can pre-empt the opportunity to establish lending relationships that are expected to yield such quasi-rents.

In this paper, using firm-level cross-sectional data in the US, we report that interest rates on loans extended by inside banks are significantly lower than those on loans extended by outside banks for younger firms in concentrated loan markets, while such loan rate differences are not clearly observed in competitive loan markets. The analytical model presented in this paper predicts that an inside bank is more likely to quote rates lower than those of outside banks to capture a customer in order to gain time to establish exclusive access to the customer’s private information, counting on the consequent future rent from informational advantages over rival banks, if the inside bank intends to acquire private information about the borrower’s creditworthiness. In light of this prediction, we conclude that the above empirical finding is consistent with the hypothesis that increased competition discourages banks from collecting borrower-specific private information.

When bankers observe a rival winning in the interbank competition for lending to a firm, they infer that the firm may be more promising than they had thought. From this consideration, they loosen their creditworthiness tests and lower the interest rates they offer in the next lending competition for the firm. Increased interbank competition reduces the impact of this observational learning and decreases the credit risk taken by each bank because of a severe winner's curse, while it increases the aggregate risk taken by the entire banking sector.