Financial Intermediation and Late Development: The Case of Meiji Japan, 1868 to 1912
January 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-01
Abstract
Was nineteenth century Japan an example of finance-led growth? Using a new panel dataset of startup firms from the Meiji Period (1868-1912), I test whether financial sector development influenced the emergence of modern industries. Results from multiple econometric models suggest that increased financial intermediation, particularly from banks, is associated with greater firm establishment. This corresponds with the theory of late development that industrialization requires intermediaries to mobilize and allocate financing. The effect is pronounced in the second half of the period and for heavy industries, which may be due to improved institutions and larger capital requirements, respectively.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
investment,
enterprise,
industrial,
financial,
entrepreneurship,
finance,
financing,
lending,
loan,
bank,
lender,
debtor,
banking
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Ordinary Least Squares,
2SLS,
Generalized Method of Moments,
VAR
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Financial Intermediation and Late Development: The Case of Meiji Japan, 1868 to 1912' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperTechnological Leadership and Late Development: Evidence from Meiji Japan, 1868-1912🔥
December 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-32R
Large family-owned conglomerates known as zaibatsu have long been credited with leading Japanese industrialization during the Meiji Period (1868-1912), despite a lack of empirical analysis. Using a new dataset collected from corporate genealogies estimate of entry probabilities, I find that characteristics associated with zaibatsu increase a firm's likelihood of being an industry pioneer. In particular, first entry probabilities increase with industry diversification and private ownership, which may provide internal financing and risk-sharing, respectively. Nevertheless, the costs of excessive diversification may deter additional pioneering, which may account for the loss of zaibatsu technological leadership by the turn of the century.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEntrepreneurship and Japanese Industrialization in Historical Perspective
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-30
Studies of entrepreneurship in nineteenth century Japan typically focus on the activities of leading industrialists who founded large, family-owned conglomerates known as zaibatsu. These individuals do not conform well with the archetypal Schumpeterian entrepreneur, but this discrepancy may be more an issue of context than behavior. However, due to a lack of documentation for smaller independent firms, it is difficult to make this comparison. To broaden the scope of analysis, I use data drawn from corporate genealogies, which provide a more complete cross-section of entrepreneurial activity. This dataset of firm entry during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) covers a wide range of industries, allowing me to analyze aspects of Japan's early industrialization that heretofore have relied on anecdotal or case evidence. I also propose a game-theoretic model of entry appropriate for entrepreneurs in late developing economies that exploit the qualitative nature of these data.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperFirm Dynamics, Persistent Effects of Entry Conditions, and Business Cycles
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-29
This paper examines how the state of the economy when businesses begin operations affects their size and performance over the lifecycle. Using micro-level data that covers the entire universe of businesses operating in the U.S. since the late 1970s, I provide new evidence that businesses born in downturns start on a smaller scale and remain smaller over their entire lifecycle. In fact, I find no evidence that these differences attenuate even long after entry. Using new data on the productivity and composition of startup businesses, I show that this persistence is related to selection at entry and demand-side channels.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperClimate Change, The Food Problem, and the Challenge of Adaptation through Sectoral Reallocation
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-29
This paper combines local temperature treatment effects with a quantitative macroeconomic model to assess the potential for global reallocation between agricultural and non-agricultural production to reduce the costs of climate change. First, I use firm-level panel data from a wide range of countries to show that extreme heat reduces productivity less in manufacturing and services than in agriculture, implying that hot countries could achieve large potential gains through adapting to global warming by shifting labor toward manufacturing and increasing imports of food. To investigate the likelihood that such gains will be realized, I embed the estimated productivity effects in a model of sectoral specialization and trade covering 158 countries. Simulations suggest that climate change does little to alter the geography of agricultural production, however, as high trade barriers in developing countries temper the influence of shifting comparative advantage. Instead, climate change accentuates the existing pattern, known as 'the food problem,' in which poor countries specialize heavily in relatively low productivity agricultural sectors to meet subsistence consumer needs. The productivity effects of climate change reduce welfare by 6-10% for the poorest quartile of the world with trade barriers held at current levels, but by nearly 70% less in an alternative policy counterfactual that moves low-income countries to OECD levels of trade openness.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperU.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-34
Many studies have documented that market concentration has risen among U.S. firms in recent decades. In this paper, we show that this rise in concentration was accompanied by tougher product market competition due to the entry of foreign competitors. Using confidential census data covering the universe of all firm sales in the U.S. manufacturing sector, we find that rising import competition increased concentration among U.S. firms by reallocating sales from smaller to larger U.S. firms and by causing firm exit. However, this increase in concentration was counteracted by the expansion of foreign firms, which reduced domestic firms' share of the U.S. market inclusive of foreign firms' sales. We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. marketconcentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIT and Beyond: The Contribution of Heterogenous Capital to Productivity
December 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-20
This paper explores the relationship between capital composition and productivity using a unique and remarkably detailed data set on firm-level, asset-specific investment in the U.S. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal regressions, I find that among all types of capital, only computers, communications equipment, software, and office building are associated (positively) with current and subsequent years' multifactor productivity. The link between offices and productivity, however, is shown to be due to the correlation between the use of offices and organizational capital. In contrast, the link between ICT equipment and productivity is robust to a number of controls and appears to be part causal effect and part reflection of the correlation between ICT and firm fixed (or slow-moving) effects. The implied marginal products by capital type are derived and compared to official data on rental prices; substantial differences exist for a number of key capital types. Lastly, I provide evidence of complementaries and substitutabilities among capital types ' a rejection of the common assumption of perfect substitutability ' and between particular capital types and labor.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIndustry Linkages from Joint Production
January 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-02
I develop a theory of joint production to quantify aggregate economies of scope. In US manufacturing data, increased export demand in one industry raises a firm's sales in its other industries that share knowledge inputs like R&D and software. I estimate that knowledge inputs contribute to economies of scope through their scalability and partial non-rivalry within the firm. On average a 10 percent increase in output in one industry lowers prices in other industries by 0.4 percent. Such economies of scope manifest disproportionately among knowledge proximate industries and imply large spillover impacts of recent US-China trade policy on producer prices.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperImport Competition and Firms' Internal Networks
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-28
Using administrative data on U.S. multisector firms, we document a cross-sectoral propagation of the import competition from China ('China shock') through firms' internal networks: Employment of an establishment in a given industry is negatively affected by China shock that hits establishments in other industries within the same firm. This indirect propagation channel impacts both manufacturing and non-manufacturing establishments, and it operates primarily through the establishment exit. We explore a range of explanations for our findings, highlighting the role of within-firm trade across sectors, scope of production, and establishment size. At the sectoral aggregate level, China shock that propagates through firms' internal networks has a sizable impact on industry-level employment dynamics.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperOlder and Slower: The Startup Deficit's Lasting Effects on Aggregate Productivity Growth
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-29
We investigate the link between declining firm entry, aging incumbent firms and sluggish U.S. productivity growth. We provide a dynamic decomposition framework to characterize the contributions to industry productivity growth across the firm age distribution and apply this framework to the newly developed Revenue-enhanced Longitudinal Business Database (ReLBD). Overall, several key findings emerge: (i) the relationship between firm age and productivity growth is downward sloping and convex; (ii) the magnitudes are substantial and significant but fade quickly, with nearly 2/3 of the effect disappearing after five years and nearly the entire effect disappearing after ten; (iii) the higher productivity growth of young firms is driven nearly exclusively by the forces of selection and reallocation. Our results suggest a cumulative drag on aggregate productivity of 3.1% since 1980. Using an instrumental variables strategy we find a consistent pattern across states/MSAs in the U.S. The patterns are broadly consistent with a standard model of firm dynamics with monopolistic competition.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDynamics of High-Growth Young Firms and the Role of Venture Capitalists
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-38
Motivated by the substantial growth and upfront investments of venture capital (VC) backed firms observed in administrative US Census data, this paper develops a firm dynamics model over the life cycle. In the model, startups choose the source of financing from VC, Angel investors, or banks, depending on their growth potential, and invest in innovation. The calibrated model explains the life-cycle dynamics of firms with different sources of financing and implies that venture capitalists' advice accounts for around 22% of the growth of VC-backed firms. A counterfactual economy without VC financing would lose aggregate consumption by around 0.4%.View Full Paper PDF
