DEBT RESTRUCTURING OF JAPANESE CORPORATIONS: EFFICIENCY OF FACTOR ALLOCATIONS AND THE DEBT-LABOR COMPLEMENTARITY

Using the data from the Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry (FSSCI), we examine whether the decrease of corporate debt subsequent to the banking crisis in the late 1990s improved the efficiency of factor allocation at the microeconomic level. While the cross-sectoral movement of capital seems to have increased in the 2000s, negative profit is associated with the increase of corporate debt during the period of mild recovery in the mid-2000s. Thus even after the banking panic and the subsequent policy measures cleaned up major nonperforming loans, some nonnegligible number of "zombie firms" must have remained.