Banking relationship numbers and new business bankruptcies
研究了日本中小企业首次结算时的往来银行数量对后续破产风险的影响，发现银行数量越多，破产风险越高。
This paper examines the effect of the number of correspondent financial institutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) at the first settlement of accounts on subsequent firm bankruptcy risk using survival models. We use a unique firm-level data set of 2667 unlisted SMEs incorporated in Japan between April 2003 and December 2009. Moreover, in the nature of the analysis, we focus on firms that transact with at least one financial institution and disclose information about profit at the first settlement. We find that more correspondent financial institutions for SMEs at the first settlement increase subsequent firm bankruptcy risk. Furthermore, we check the robustness of this result with the method of instrumental variables (IV methods) and obtain similar results; in other words, the risk of firm bankruptcy increases with the number of correspondent financial institutions.