DEPOSIT GUARANTEES AND THE BURST OF THE JAPANESE BUBBLE ECONOMY

This paper examines the current status of deposit guarantees in Japan and how they have functioned during the burst of the bubble economy in the first half of the 1990s. During this period, the Ministry of Finance has had to depart from its "no failure" policy and declare depository institutions insolvent. The resources of Japan's most important deposit insurance agency—the Deposit Insurance Corporation—were exhausted as of late 1995. The other deposit insurance agency for small specialized depositories also is technically insolvent. Many of the problems that Japan's deposit guarantee system experienced are similar to those experienced in the United States during the 1980s.     

Asset Returns,Discount Rate Changes,and Market Efficiency

The primary purpose of this paper is to reconcile the previous findings of discount rate endogeneity with the presence of discount rate announcement effects in securities markets. The crux of this reconciliation is the distinction between “technical” discount rate changes that are endogenous and “nontechnical” changes which contain some informative policy implications. In essence, we attempt to separate expected discount rate changes from unexpected changes, or equivalently, the expected component of discount rate changes from the unexpected component. If markets are efficient, the former should have no announcement effects while the latter may be associated with an announcement effect. Accordingly, the focus of the empirical analysis is on the interaction between discount rate exogeneity, the specific monetary policy regime, and accouncement effects. In addition, we examine whether the behavior of these markets in the postannouncement period is consistent with the rapid price adjustment implied by market efficiency.     

Do Firms Rebalance Their Capital Structures?

We empirically examine whether firms engage in a dynamic rebalancing of their capital structures while allowing for costly adjustment. We begin by showing that the presence of adjustment costs has significant implications for corporate financial policy and the interpretation of previous empirical results. After confirming that financing behavior is consistent with the presence of adjustment costs, we find that firms actively rebalance their leverage to stay within an optimal range. Our evidence suggests that the persistent effect of shocks on leverage observed in previous studies is more likely due to adjustment costs than indifference toward capital structure.