Holden and El-Bannany (2004) showed that Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) play an important role in increasing Return On Asset (ROA) in their analysis of banks in the United Kingdom. The present article investigates whether this conclusion also applies to Japanese banks. We found that ATMs do not have any influence on the ROA of Japanese banks; however, it was revealed that ATMs had positive effects on fees and commissions (income) from 2000 to 2003, and positive effects of ATMs on interest income were also seen recently. We conclude that in Japan, ATMs do not influence ROA, which includes the overall profits of bank transactions, but do contribute to particular businesses in that they can make the most of their abilities.

Although the Japanese financial regulators have been promoting region-based relationship banking in recent years, many regional banks expand their branch network. This paper investigates the effects of branch expansion on cost and profit efficiency for the Japanese regional banks over the period of fiscal year 1999-2009. The principal findings are as follows: First, focusing on the local activities without expanding branch network is associated with improved cost efficiency. Also, regional banks expanding branch network in certain level exhibit higher cost efficiency, whereas excessive branch expansion causes lower cost efficiency. Next, in contrast to the results for cost efficiency, regional banks focusing on the local activities exhibit lower profit efficiency. However, our results indicate that excessive branch expansion also relates to lower profit efficiency. Finally, robustness results are obtained from the samples excluding regional banks located in urban regions. The findings in this paper suggest that an adequate levels of branch expansion have positive impacts on both cost and profit efficiencies for regional banks through diversifying banks' portfolio, etc.

Few studies have investigated whether Japanese banks affiliated with bank holding companies are more efficient and profitable than independent banks. The present paper tests this hypothesis by using both a stochastic frontier approach and a market valuation approach. First, our results suggest that banks affiliated with bank holding companies are not more cost-efficient than are independent banks. Because of the brief history of Japanese BHCs, it is fair to conclude that the formation of regional bank holding companies has not achieved efficiency gains so far. Second, we find that banks affiliated with bank holding companies are more profit-efficient than are independent banks. This is particularly apparent when the establishment of the bank holding companies increases market power in regional markets. This supports the Financial Services Agency’s policy to increase the profitability of regional banks through bank consolidation. Finally, based on standard event study methodology, we find that the market did not regard news about the establishment of bank holding companies as significant events. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2003bank holding company, Japanese regional banks, stochastic frontier approach, cost efficiency, profit efficiency, event study,

In this study, we investigate the market characteristics of prefectures in which non-local regional banks of other prefectures choose to enter and the motivations of such banks for doing so, considering the Japanese government's requirements for regional financial institutions to play an active role in stimulating local economies. In particular, by pooling prefecture-level data, the market characteristics of prefectures that experience more entrances by non-local regional banks compared with other prefectures are examined. It was found that entrance by non-local regional banks is more common in prefectures where high-performing companies are active. Therefore, it can be considered that non-local regional banks that are not satisfied with lending opportunities in their home prefectures enter other prefectures to increase their lending opportunities to high-performing companies. This study contributes by clarifying why many regional banks do not concentrate on businesses within their local regions and intentionally enter other prefectures, which is in contrast with the intent of the region-based relationship banking policy.Keywords: region-based relationship banking, non-local regional banks, entries into other prefectures, characteristics of regional markets, expanding lending opportunities. JEL Classification: G212

Although Japanese credit associations are nonprofit cooperative financial institutions, they shoulder the same financial functions as regional banks that are stock companies and they could compete with each other in a regional market. On the other hand, governance structures of credit associations tend to make disciplines be weaker than those of regional banks and their performances might be better than regional banks for these reasons.In the present paper, we empirically investigated whether the objective functions of credit associations are different from those of regional banks with considering the differences of their governance structures. As a result, although significant differences of profitability of these two types of institutions were not detected, it was also demonstrated that credit associations can capture more share of deposits than regional banks and the former are more conservative in risk taking than the latter. From these, there is a possibility that Japanese credit associations have different objective functions from regional banks.