Did mergers help Japanese mega-banks avoid failure? Analysis of the distance to default of banks

This paper applied the distance to default (DD) measure to five mergers among large Japanese banks during the crisis period. The DD helps us analyze whether mergers that took place in the late 1990s and 2000s made the merged banks financially more robust, as intended. Our findings include: (1) A merged bank fundamentally inherits financial soundness of premerged banks, without incremental value from the merger; and (2) A negative DD was observed following the merger. The findings of this case study are consistent with the view that large Japanese banks’ mergers either failed to implement intended scale economies or were motivated by a belief in the too-big-to-fail policy.     

Is There Private Information in the FX Market? The Tokyo Experiment

We provide evidence of private information in the foreign exchange market. The evidence comes from the introduction of trading in Tokyo over the lunch hour. Lunch-return variance doubles with the introduction of trading, which cannot be due to public information since the flow of public information did not change with the trading rules. We then exploit microstructure theory to discriminate between the two alternatives: private information and mispricing. Four key results support the predictions of private-information models. Three of these involve changes in the intraday volatility U-shape. The fourth is that opening trade causes mispricing's share in variance to fall.