مقررات زدایی از فعالیت های پذیره نویسی بانکی: بررسی تاثیرات در یورو ـ ین و بازار اوراق قرضه شرکتی ژاپنی

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a 1993 relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks on bond issues in the Euro–yen and Japanese corporate bond markets. Evidence is presented to suggest that the relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks was associated with a significant fall in spreads in both the Euro–yen and Japanese corporate bond markets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a 1993 relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks operating in the Euromarket on spreads on bonds issued in the Euro–yen and Japanese corporate bond markets. To date, analyses of these markets have been undertaken separately. Following the literature on spread determination for corporate bonds issued in the United States (see, for example [13] and [14]), the recent literature examining spread determination on corporate bonds issued in Japan has focused on either the existence of conflicts of interest occurring when banks are allowed to act as underwriters in the bond market, or reductions in spreads/commissions when banks enter the underwriting market [4], [7], [17] and [18]. Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in the analysis of the Euromarket. Melnik and Nissim [10] examine the determinants of underwriter fees, underwriter spreads and underpricing in the Euro–dollar bond market in 1996–1997. Melnik and Nissim [11] investigate the impact of the introduction of the Euro on issuance costs for Euro–dollar, Euro–Franc, Euro–Guilder and Euro–Mark bonds. For Euro–yen bonds, recent analyses include investigations of the term structure of high grade Euro–yen bonds (see [5]); the existence of conflicts of interest in underwriting [17]; and the impact of three Japanese deregulations on bond spreads in the Euro-market [12]. This paper investigates the factors influencing spreads on corporate Euro–yen bond issues by firms resident in Japan and spreads on corporate bonds issued in Japan over the period April 1991 to February 1994. This paper differs from the existing literature in the following points. First, this paper investigates the impact of the deregulation of the three bureaus agreement on the domestic Japanese bond market. At the time of this deregulation, there is a significant fall in spreads in both the domestic and Euro–yen bond markets. Second, it appears to be the first paper that simultaneously examines spread determination in both the Euro–yen bond and domestic Japanese markets over the same period of time. This examination enables a comparison of the determinants of the spreads of the two types of bonds, and also the pricing of those determinants. Earlier findings that reject the existence of conflicts associated with bank underwriting in the Euro–yen market are confirmed. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 2 briefly describes changes in the Japanese underwriting market in the 1990s, and the likely impact of these changes on spreads in the Japanese corporate bond and Euro–yen bond markets. Details of the models to be estimated are contained in Section 3. The data used are explained in Section 4, and Section 5 presents the empirical results. Section 6 concludes the paper.

The results presented in this paper suggest that the 1993 deregulation of the three bureaus agreement that governed underwriting arrangements in the Euro–yen market had an impact not only on spreads on corporate bonds issued in the Euro–yen market, but also on spreads on corporate bonds issued in the Japanese domestic market. In the domestic market, the clear winners of this deregulation would appear to be issuers with high ratings. In the Eurobond market, the benefits of this spread reduction do not appear to have been concentrated in any particular group of issuers.