Iichiro Uesugi – författare

This is the first book to report the details of the current status of interfirm relationships in Japan. Based on a unique data set of firms, the authors describe the characteristics of interfirm transactions in a manner unprecedented in the literature. Special emphasis is placed on the nature of payment/collection between firms. Payment for interfirm transactions is usually made on account, or by payment after delivery, rather than by immediate payment. Thus, most interfirm transactions are accompanied by a provision of credit (i.e., lending/borrowing) from a seller to a buyer, referred to as trade credit. Although trade credit is used all around the world and accounts for a large portion of firms’ balance sheets, researchers, lacking detailed data, have long encountered serious difficulty in clarifying how and why firms use trade credit.

In this work the authors use a huge, unique data set of about 380,000 firms in Japan during the 2007–2010 period. To grasp the entirety of this enormous data set, which is tantamount to a picture of all firms currently operating in Japan, this brief summarizes descriptive statistics and conducts univariate analyses of the data. Also provided is the legal background of trade credit practice in Japan from the “law and economics” perspective. In this manner, the book furnishes vital information that can be used as a reference for future theoretical and empirical analyses of trade credit and interfirm relationships.

This book is one of the first comprehensive works to fill the knowledge gap resulting from the limited number of empirical studies on interfirm networks. The in-depth empirical research presented here is based on a massive transaction relationship database of approximately 400,000 Japanese firms. This volume, unlike others, focuses on the role of interfirm networks in three different fields: (1) macroeconomic activities, (2) economic geography and firm dynamics, and (3) firm–bank relationships. The database for this work is constructed in collaboration with Japan''s largest credit research company, Teikoku Data Bank, and covers a substantial portion of Japanese firms with information on firms'' transaction partners, shareholders, financial institutions, and other attributes, including their locations and performance.

Networks prevail in many aspects of economic activities and play a major role in explaining a wide variety of economic phenomena from business cycles to knowledge spillovers, which has motivated economists to produce a number of excellent works.  In the policy arena, there has been a growing concern on the vulnerabilities of networks based on the casual observation that idiosyncratic shocks on firms can be amplified through inter-firm connections and leads to a systemic crisis. Typical examples are the manufacturing supply-chain networks in the automobile and electronics industries which propagated regionally concentrated shocks (the Great East Japan Earthquake and floods in Thailand in 2011) into global ones. An abundance of theoretical literature on the formation and functions of networks is available already.

This book breaks new ground, however, and provides an excellent opportunity for the reader to gain a more integrated understanding of the role of networks in the economy. The Economics of Interfirm Networks will be of special interest to economists and practitioners seeking empirical and quantitative knowledgeon interfirm and firm–bank networks.

This book uses multiple data sources to comprehensively examine issues related to small and medium enterprise (SME) finance in Japan. The first feature of the book is that it empirically examines issues that are important not only for Japan but also for other countries. These issues include zombie firms, the expansion of the bank lending market across regions, the role of loan guarantees during economic crises, competition between state-owned banks and private financial institutions, and the impact of bank mergers. The second feature of the book is that it presents and makes available to researchers statistical data on SME finance that were previously unavailable due to a lack of accurate and detailed data sources. The book shows, for the first time in Japan, the extent of concentration at the prefecture level in both loan and deposit markets over a 15-year period. It also shows for the first time not only in Japan but also in other countries an indicator of the flow of funds between regions via loans and deposits, providing new insights into the role of regional fund allocation. These findings will be of interest not only to researchers interested in Japan, but also to those in both developed and emerging economies interested in the evolution of SME finance.