Recently, credit ratings have been enhancing the influence on issuers as well as the national economy. This paper explains the historical development and several current features of the Japanese bond market, and discusses why credit ratings gained a significant role in the 1990s. We also present...

Since 2003, the Financial Services Agency has set relationship banking enhancement program as an important strategic task to improve the functions of regional financial institutions. In this enhancement program, the FSA recommended that regional financial institutions introduce new financial...

This paper aims to assess the technical efficiency of Japanese trust banks by using the stochastic distance function approach, which is suitable for analyzing complex trust banks but has never applied for Japanese trust banks. Although the trust banking industry has been one of the most...

As the governance of financial institutions is becoming an important issue, there are many papers empirically investigating the governance issues of banks, which are stock companies. However, cooperative structured financial institutions (co-ops), which have a unique governance structure...

In this study, we investigate the market characteristics of prefectures in which non-local regional banks of other prefectures choose to enter and the motivations of such banks for doing so, considering the Japanese government’s requirements for regional financial institutions to play an...