CIRJE-F-17. Dinc, I. Serdar, "The Shareholding Structure of Japanese Banks and Their Real Estate Lending in the 1980s", September 1998.

This paper studies the effects of the bank shareholding structure on real estate lending by Japanese banks in the 1980s. It shows that the shareholders did@not passively leave all the monitoring of bank managers to regulatory agents. The real estate lending of the regional banks decreased as the total shares held by the large shareholders increased. However, the opposite was true for the national banks that led a financial keiretsu. Their real estate lending increased in the shares held by the members of the bank's keiretsu. The cross shareholding and other business ties between these banks and their same-keiretsu shareholders protected the bank managers from the discipline of other shareholders.