This paper investigates whether banking integration plays an important role in transmitting financial shocks across geographical boundaries by using a dataset on the branch network of nationwide city banks and prefecture-level dataset on the formation and collapse of the real estate bubble in Japan. The results show that the credit and economic cycle of financially integrated prefectures exhibits higher sensitivity to fluctuation in land prices in cities relative to financially isolated ones. These results suggest nationwide banks can be a source of economic volatility when they pass on the impacts of financial shocks to host economies. (JEL E44, G21, R30)

Finding the causal effects of liquidity shocks on credit supply is complicated by the endogenous relation between loan demand and liquidity position of banks. This paper attempts to overcome this problem by exploiting, as a natural experiment, the exogenous deposit outflow prompted by the removal of a blanket deposit guarantee on time deposits in Japan. We find that just as the government placed a cap on insurance for time deposits in 2002, weak banks suffered from a large outflow of partially insured time deposits. More importantly, we find that those weak banks were not able to raise a sufficient amount of fully insured ordinary deposits to make up for the loss of time deposits, which, consequently, forced them to cut back on loan supply.These results are consistent with the theory that the imperfect substitutability of insured deposits and uninsured deposits affects the tightness of banks' financing constraints and ultimately the supply of bank loans.JEL Codes: E44, G21

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