بدهی، سرمایه گذاری R & D و پیشرفت های فن آوری: مطالعه رفتار شرکت های تولیدی ژاپن در طول 1990s

Based on a panel data set of Japanese manufacturing firms in research-intensive industries, we investigate quantitatively the extent to which outstanding debt affected firms' R&D activities during the 1990s. We find that massive amounts of outstanding debt had a significant, negative effect on R&D investment during that time. We also find that R&D expenditures were closely linked to firm-level total factor productivity growth over the same period. In fact, a ten-percentage-point increase in the debt–asset ratio lowered the rate of firm-level total factor productivity growth by 0.26 percentage points between 1999 and 2001, because it reduced R&D activities. J. Japanese Int. Economies21 (4) (2007) 403–423.

A consensus has not yet been reached about what caused the long period of stagnancy that the Japanese economy experienced during the 1990s. The supply-siders argue that stagnancy generally results mainly from supply-side factors, such as inefficiencies in the production sector or a banking sector that suffers from numerous bad loans. They warn that the growth potential of the Japanese economy is falling. For example, Hayashi and Prescott (2002) demonstrate, based on the standard growth model, that the decline in the rate of total factor productivity (abbreviated as TFP) growth and the institution of shorter working hours are responsible for the current stagnancy of the Japanese economy. Convincing as their argument is, however, it does little to explain why the TFP growth rate suddenly dropped in the 1990s.

Using a panel data set of research-intensive Japanese manufacturing firms, we investigated the determinants of firm R&D activities during the 1990s. Our main findings are as follows. First, massive debt accumulation had a negative effect on R&D investment in the late 1990s, although outstanding debt had little effect on R&D investment in the late 1980s. Second, R&D investment was closely linked to firm-level TFP growth rates in the late 1990s, while this link was much weaker in the late 1980s. Our findings suggest that lingering outstanding debt was in part responsible for the slowdown in firm-level TFP growth rates that occurred during the 1990s. Moreover, our results have important implications for the distributional characteristics of firm-level TFP growth rates. The dispersion of firm-level TFP growth rates across firms was greater in the 1990s, an increase that resulted from the fact that firms' debt–asset ratios were also more dispersed during the same period. It is true that the average debt–asset ratio of large Japanese manufacturing firms declined during the 1990s. However, a number of firms were also waiting to clear up their outstanding debt during that time.