The Samurai Bond: Credit Supply and Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan By SERGI BASCO AND JOHN P. TANG* While credit supply growth is associated with exacerbating financial crises, its impact on long-run economic growth is unclear. Using bond payments to samurai in nineteenth century Japan as a quasi-natural experiment and exploiting regional variation, we find that bond payments are associated with persistent redistributive effects between both regions and sectors. Areas with early railway access and higher bond value per capita experienced faster income growth in the tertiary sector and slower growth in the primary, with analogous effects for sectoral labor shares. Our interpretation is that the interaction between credit supply and market access facilitated economic growth and structural transformation. Keywords: credit supply, finance-led growth, market access, railways, structural change JEL codes: E51, N15, O47 *Basco: Universitat Autònoma Barcelona and Fundació MOVE (
[email protected]). Tang: Yale University (
[email protected]) and Australian National University. Tang acknowledges financial support from the Australian Research Council (DE120101426). We received useful feedback from Yannick Dupraz, James Fenske, Richard Grossman, Tim Guinnane, Chiaki Moriguchi, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe, Masato Shizume, Richard Sylla, Zach Ward, David Weinstein, Eugene White, and participants from the EHA, AFSE, and NBER Japan Project meetings and from seminars at Hitotsubashi University, Waseda University, UC Davis, UC Irvine, Warwick University, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Universidad de Barcelona. We thank Kyoji Fukao for generously sharing some of the data used in this research. Any errors are ours. 1 How does the growth of credit supply affect financial and economic activity? In recent years, negative effects of credit supply growth have been implicated in the severity of the financial crisis of the past decade, namely through the accumulation of mortgage debt in the United States (Mian and Sufi 2009).