The bursting of the stock market and real estate bubbles of the 1980s dramatically shocked and changed the performance of the Japanese economy and the functioning of its banking system, resulting in a prolonged period of economic malaise in Japan, commonly known as the "Lost Decade," although it...

This study uses Japanese data to address an important shortcoming of most of the existing literature on credit availability by including a set of unlisted firms (which are the firms most likely to be bank dependent) in the analysis, and by investigating differences between the treatment of...