ECONOMISTS USING the term "zombie" used to have Japanese companies in mind. Firms that are dead competitively but continue to haunt their living peers proliferated in the decade or so following Japan's financial crisis of 1990, as banks tided unprofitable borrowers over, at times with the government's encouragement. By 2001 zombies made up more than 15% of listed firms, according to calculations in 2012 by Nakamura Jun-ichi, then of Hito-tsubashi University, and Fukuda Shin-ichi of the University of Tokyo. It took drastic reforms of accounting rules and bank-supervision policies in the early 2000s to begin clearing out and reviving the corporate undead.
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