The Japanese banking crisis provides a natural experiment to test whether a loan supply shock can affect real economic activity. Because the shock was external to U.S. credit markets, yet connected through the Japanese bank penetration of U.S. markets, this event allows us to identify an exogenous loan supply shock and ultimately link that shock to construction activity in U.S. commercial real estate markets. We exploit the variation across geographically distinct commercial real estate markets to establish conclusively that loan supply shocks emanating from Japan had real effects on economic activity in the United States.

We examine the misallocation of credit in Japan associated with the perverse incentives faced by banks to provide additional credit to the weakest firms. Firms are more likely to receive additional bank credit if they are in poor financial condition, because troubled Japanese banks have an incentive to allocate credit to severely impaired borrowers in order to avoid the realization of losses on their own balance sheets. This "evergreening" behavior is more prevalent among banks that have reported capital ratios close to the required minimum, and is compounded by the incentives arising from extensive corporate affiliations.

One of the more dramatic financial events of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the surge in Japanese stock prices that was immediately followed by a very sharp decline of more than 50 percent. While the unprecedented fluctuations in Japanese stock prices were domestic financial shocks, the unique institutional characteristics of the Japanese economy produce a framework that is particularly suited to the transmission of such shocks to other countries through the behavior of the Japanese banking system. The large size of Japanese bank lending operations in the United States enables us to use U.S. banking data to investigate the extent to which this domestic Japanese financial shock was transmitted to the United States, as well as to identify a supply shock to U.S. bank lending that is independent of U.S. loan demand. We find that binding risk-based capital requirements associated with the decline in the Japanese stock market resulted in a decline in commercial lending by Japanese banks in the United States that was both economically and statistically significant. This finding has added importance given the severe real estate loan problems currently faced by Japanese banks. How Japanese bank regulators decide to resolve these problems will have significant implications for credit availability in the United States as well as in other countries with a significant Japanese bank presence.

The dramatic reduction in the growth rate of bank lending associated with the 1990-91 recession, particularly in New England, has evoked claims by many observers of a credit crunch. However, because of the difficulty in determining whether the observed slow credit growth is a demand or supply phenomenon, convincing evidence of the practical importance of credit crunches for economic activity remains elusive. We overcome this obstacle by examining a cross-section of banks in New England that have experienced the same economic downturn, effectively controlling for changes in demand. We find empirical support for a capital crunch, whereby poorly capitalized institutions shrink to satisfy capital requirements. This alone is not a sufficient condition for a credit crunch. However, we find s6me additional evidence that the ca~~ital crunch may have limited credit availability in New England.~.:We thank Paul Charrette and Robert Chicoski for able research assistance and Richard Kopcke for valuable insights and discussions. Helpful comments were received from

Concern with the potential effect of bank mergers on small business lending has stemmed from a belief that larger acquirers may be less willing than their smaller targets to be active in the small business lending market. However, we find that in roughly half the commercial and savings bank mergers of the past three years, the acquirer has a larger portfolio share of small business loans than its target; moreover, the most common acquirer of small banks is another small bank. The empirical results support the hypothesis that acquirers tend to recast the target in their own image, causing small business loan portfolio shares of the consolidated bank to converge toward the pre-merger portfolio share of the acquirer. Since acquirers are almost as likely to have larger as smaller shares of small business loans in their portfolios, compared to their targets, this suggests that not all mergers will shrink small business lending; many will actually increase it.