The impacts of “shock therapy” on large and small clients: Experiences from two large bank failures in Japan

Abstract

A “shock therapy” might have different impacts between large and small firms. In this paper, we focus on the clients of two large failed Japanese banks; LTCB and NCB. We first show that subsequent events after the bank failures allowed new LTCB to adopt a “shock therapy” but new NCB to keep “soft budget constraints”. We then show that the different therapies made performances of these two banks' customers very different. Under the shock therapy, large firms showed significant recovery of their profits but small firms did not. In contrast, under the soft budget constraints, large firms did not show recovery and small firms terminated the relationship by the new bank experienced significant decline in their profits.