The Frontier of Corporate Governance Analysis: Evolution of the corporate system in Japan and the impact of the world financial crisis

2009 - 2010

This project aims to examine the most urgent and crucial issues on corporate governance in Japanese firms. In this project, we will primarily focus on the causes and effects of increasing foreign institutional shareholders and the unwinding of cross shareholding; redesigning a contingent governance structure following the collapse of the main bank system; clarifying the complementary or substitutional relationship between internal governance and external governance; the control over business units or subsidiaries following the introduction of the holding company system; the regulation of financial institutions; and the theoretical reexamination of the complementarity of the various subsystems involved in corporate governance. By examining these topics, we expect to comprehensively clarify corporate governance in Japan, which is now characterized as the hybridization or rather combination of two different modes of relationships, namely, market-based governance and relationship-based organizational structures. In this project, we also try to address the impact of the world financial crisis on the evolution of corporate governance in Japan. The research results of our team will be published by the end of spring 2011.

April 14, 2009 - March 31, 2011