Did financing constraints cause investment stagnation in Japan after the 1990s?

Abstract

Has investment by Japanese firms been affected by financing constraints since the collapse of the asset price bubble? This study answers the question while improving on the weaknesses of the models used in previous studies. It employs panel data for Japanese listed firms in four R&D-intensive industries. We divide our sample by firm size and examine three periods with different economic environments: the first half of the “two lost decades” from 1991 to 2000, the second half of the ‘two lost decades’ from 2001 to 2009, and the period following the ‘two lost decades’ from 2010 to 2016. We construct new investment functions based on the Euler equation by considering both physical and R&D investment factors to remove estimator bias, thus enabling us to determine whether firms face financing constraints accurately. The estimation results indicate that there were financing constraints on both R&D and physical investments by large listed firms from 1991 to 2000 and from 2010 to 2016. Conversely, the weak growth of both R&D and physical investments by small listed firms from 2010 to 2016 was not attributed to financing constraints but the lack of productive investment opportunities. Different policy measures are needed depending on whether the investment is stagnant due to financing constraints or the lack of investment opportunities.