DOES THE AGENCY COST MODEL EXPLAIN BUSINESS FLUCTUATIONS IN JAPAN? : A BAYESIAN APPROACH TO ESTIMATE AGENCY COST FOR FIRMS CLASSIFIED BY SIZE

We attempt to estimate a state space model of investment and borrowing in a Bayesian framework, and to extract the unobservable agency costs of Japanese firms, which we differentiate by firm size.Our estimates suggest that agency cost exhibited a declining trend in the late 1980s, which changed to an increasing trend in the 1990s. We pinned down the driving force of fluctuations in agency cost as the market value of land.Furthermore, we found that the investment and borrowing behavior of small firms was very much affected by their agency costs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Our evidence suggests that imperfections in the capital market were important for small firms in Japan.