'By a Silken Thread': regional banking integration and credit reallocation during Japan’s Lost DecadeMathias Hoffmann and Toshihiro Okubo No 102, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Abstract: A key benefit from banking integration is that it allows credit to be reallocated to regions with high credit demand. Using the natural experiment of Japan’s lost decade, we show that this reallocation channel mitigated the real effects from the bank liquidity shock in prefectures with many bank-dependent SMEs. To account for the potential endogeneity of banking integration, we exploit the fact that regional segmentation of banking markets in Japan goes back to the institutions set up for silk export finance in the late 19th century. Using silk as an instrument for modern-day regional banking integration, we illustrate how the bias of the OLS estimate can provide information about unobserved cross-regional heterogeneity in bank-firm matches when only aggregate regional data is available. Our results highlight that well-integrated banking markets are important and complementary to bond markets in limiting macroeconomic asymmetries in a monetary union, in particular during major financial crises. Keywords: Japan; Lost Decade; banking integration; regional business cycles; transmission of financial shocks; bank lending channel; firm-borrowing channel; reallocation channel; internal capital markets; monetary union (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:102 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.