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Companies Continue to Unwind Cross-Shareholdings — The Fiscal 1999 Cross-Shareholding Survey
... These mergers watered down the strong segregation between corporate groups and created opportunities for firms in the keiretsu hierarchy to widen the scope of their business. Moreover, cross shareholding within the keiretsu groups, which had always been a protective measure against hostile takeovers and the influence of stockholders, diminished (Inoue, 2000). The case of Nissan Corporation, taken over by Renault in 1999, demonstrates the impact of this development. ...
The influence of industrial structure, more specifically of business ownership, is investigated on the level of unemployment in Japan. The question is to what extent business ownership, i.e., entrepreneurship, can reduce the level of unemployment. It will be concluded that Japan is hardly an outlier when using a simple model of the relationship between unemployment and the rate of business ownership. The model is calibrated using recent data of 23 OECD countries. It shows a minor underestimation of the rise in unemployment in Japan in the period 1984-2002. Arguments are brought forward why this might be the case. We argue that small firms in Japan have benefitted in the past from the protective environment of the keiretsu structure. In the current process of industrial restructuring, keiretsu support is dissipating, but has not yet been adequatly replaced with a market environment conducive to the establishment and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The underestimation of the rise in unemployment is a reflection of the limited access of small firms to the market in Japan.
... 3. Cross-shareholding. Cross-shareholding ratios, which began to decline in the early 1990s, reached an all-time low in 1999 (Nissei Kiso Kenkyûjo, 1999;Inoue, 2000). 27 The longterm holding ratio, which includes not only confirmed cross-holdings but also one-sided stable shareholdings involving financial institutions, also reached new lows in 1999. ...
This Article offers new perspectives on the market for corporate control, the convergence debate, and Japanese corporate governance. We begin by applying in the corporate governance setting two related insights from other fields: from economics, the theory that there is no universally efficient organizational model; from organizational behavior, evidence that diverse groups outperform homogeneous ones. We then consider the potential for convergence toward a particular governance technology - the market for corporate control - to increase the desirable trait of diversity within economic systems. Takeovers, we argue, are not exclusively a disciplinary device, but also an engine of managerial and legal innovation. We apply these insights to Japan through a detailed examination of previously unexplored data on Japanese M&A. We first link the historically low level of Japanese M&A activity to a thick institutional environment much more complex than the conventional focus on cross-shareholding suggests. Among the more startling findings is the existence of negative control premiums in Japanese tender offers and the role of legal shareholder protections in dampening the market for corporate control. Next, we show how the dearth of takeovers is inextricably linked to the lack of diversity in Japanese corporate practices. We then explore how recent changes in "institutions for deals" in Japan correlate with increased takeover activity, which in turn is linked to the creation of a broader range of governance practices, managerial innovations, and structural shifts in corporate lawmaking processes. The Article concludes by analyzing the implications of our findings for two academic debates: the role of functional substitutes in comparative corporate governance theory, and the impact of legal investor protections on corporate governance patterns.
This paper investigates utilization of discretionary accounting practices in the context of international bank regulation under the Basle Accord. Specifically, we explore implications of earnings management as a means of regulatory-capital arbitrage by Japanese banks during a period of financial duress, 1989–1996. Using a sample of 607 pooled time series and cross-sectional observations, we find evidence that Japanese banks’ lending was capital constrained, and that banks set gains on securities sales and loan-loss provisions in such a way as to smooth reported income and replenish regulatory capital. Our results support the hypothesis that the form of earnings management examined may have been instrumental in enabling some Japanese banks to comply with international capital regulation. We contend that this behavior is otherwise inexplicable on the basis of significant informational, tax or economic motivations.
Limit-order trading mechanisms, corporate ownership structure, and incentive structures in the Japanese brokerage industry differ from those in the US in several important ways. This paper exploits these differences to examine the joint and cross-sectional determinants of adverse selection costs, brokerage coverage, and trading activity for a large sample of Japanese firms traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We find that adverse selection costs are associated with firm characteristics but not with ownership characteristics, which implies that adverse selection costs are affected by inside trading rather than inside holdings. We also find that while brokerage coverage reduces adverse selection costs, higher adverse selection costs lead more brokerage firms to enter the market because of the greater profit potential. Finally, we find that causality also runs both ways between brokerage coverage and trading volume: brokerage coverage increases trading volume and trading volume increases brokerage coverage.
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