Transaction Partners and Firm Relocation Choice: Evidence from the Tohoku Earthquake

Arito Ono, Daisuke Miyakawa, Kaoru Hosono, Hirofumi Uchida, Taisuke Uchino and Iichiro Uesugi

No 11, HIT-REFINED Working Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: A firm’s choice of location is very important because it reveals the firm’s dynamics. Using a unique firm-level data set, we examine whether and how the presence of incumbent transaction partners (i.e., suppliers, customers, and lender banks) affects this choice. To this end, we focus on those firms that were forced to relocate their headquarters because of the severe damage inflicted by the Tohoku Earthquake. We find that after the earthquake, firms tended to move to areas where their customers were located, but not to areas where their suppliers were located. We also find that firms tended to move to areas where the bank branches that they had transacted with were located. Further, we find that the sizable impact of the presence of incumbent customers and banks on the probability of the firms’ relocations diminished if the customers and the bank branches were also damaged by the earthquake. On balance, these results suggest that the presence of healthy transaction partners is an important factor in the firms’ choice of location.

Keywords: relocation choice; agglomeration; transaction partners; Tohoku Earthquake (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G20 L14 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-geo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Working Paper: Transaction Partners and Firm Relocation Choice: Evidence from the Tohoku Earthquake (2014)
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