Disentangling prefectural similarities in the capital structure of Japanese SMEs through pairwise testing

We investigate the capital structure of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Japan during 2007-2019 to identify whether firm-specific determinants of leverage exhibit locational differences among Japanese prefectures. To do so, we propose a testing scheme that disentangles potential similarities across prefecture pairs. When we apply the proposed testing scheme by creating 1081 prefecture pairs, we find that the impact of the firm-specific determinants of leverage does not greatly differ between prefecture pairs in terms of both sign and magnitude in contrast to the significant difference found by conventional hypothesis testing. As a convenient tool for other geographical research, we also discuss that the proposed testing scheme is helpful for regional policy-making, specifically during period of external shocks, the latest of which could be regarded as the COVID-19 pandemic.