Capital injection, restructuring targets and personnel management: The case of Japanese regional banks

A case study of the Japanese bank recapitalization by Hoshi and Kashyap (2005) identified a bank that overstated the progress of required personnel downsizing by shifting employees to subsidiaries. This paper asks if the recapitalization program had a design flaw. We focus on regional banks with a unique panel dataset of 81 banking groups that allows us to observe the employment levels of subsidiaries, in addition to those of parent banks, over fiscal 1994-2006. We estimate a labor-demand equation with sluggish adjustment to compare the employment patterns of public capital recipients and other banks. The result indicates that the shuffling of personnel to subsidiaries was a common response among banks that received large capital injections. Our finding highlights a tension between a reconstruction program and labor law when a country has a tight law on dismissal.