Resource reallocation and zombie lending in Japan in the 1990s

We investigate how resources were reallocated in Japan during the 1990s, a decade of economic recession, by measuring aggregate productivity growth (APG) using plant-level data of manufacturers from 1981 to 2000. We find that the contribution to APG of resource reallocation deteriorated in the 1990s and became negative during the late 1990s, when a financial crisis occurred. Matched firm-plant data suggest that misdirected lending by banks to failing firms (zombie lending) allowed them to avoid reducing production inputs, especially labor. Our counter-factual analysis using a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous plants indicates that without zombie lending, annual APG would have been higher by one percentage point during the 1990s. (c) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.