This paper provides a brief explanation of the Japanese public credit guarantee system and analyzes what role it played during the global financial crisis. The author conducted a questionnaire survey of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Aichi Prefecture, the prefecture most seriously...

In June 2005, a questionnaire survey was sent to 9000 companies in the Kansai Area (Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo), the second largest economic block in Japan, with 2041 companies responding. This article introduces the results of this questionnaire survey. The greatest feature of this study is that,...

After the global financial crisis, the Japanese government enacted the Financing Facilitation Act in 2009 to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that had fallen into unprofitable conditions. Under this law, when troubled debtors asked financial institutions to ease repayment...

Previous research suggests that loan officers may play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about SMEs. For the first time, we analyze this hypothesis and find empirical evidence that indicates that loan officer activities are associated with bank production of...

In June 2005, a questionnaire survey was sent to 9000 companies in the Kansai Area (Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo), the second largest economic block in Japan, with 2041 companies responding. This article introduces the results of this questionnaire survey. The greatest feature of this study is that,...

The current literature on SME loan underwriting assumes that banks use just one of two lending technologies: relationship lending for opaque SMEs and transactions-based lending for relatively transparent SMEs. Recent work has departed from this view and hypothesizes that banks use a variety of...