An explanation of Main Bank relationship in Japan

First, it is necessary to define what a Japanese "main bank" is. The "main bank" is defined as the "financial group" ("kinyu keiretsu" in japanese) in the paper. "Financial group" is defined in principle by the amount of financing that a bank supplies to a particular borrowing company. When a given company has taken out the largest amount of loans from a particular bank for the past three or more years consecutively, the company is …

…The first was to examine the relationship between changes in main bank affiliations and changes in the uncertainty that borrowing companies were confronted with. The second was to examine whether the main bank relationship actually contributed to offsetting movements in the operating performance of individual companies. Both of these examinations suggest negative conclusion; in general, no systematic relationships can be observed which would indicate the existence of risk-sharing between main banks and their major customers.