Economic Analysis of Organizations and Institutions: The design of organizations and institutions to enhance corporate performance and growth

2007 - 2010

The Japanese economy experienced a fifteen-year period of adjustment following the collapse of the bubble economy. As it now attempts to take off toward new frontiers, Japan needs to adopt organizational and institutional designs that will heighten and promote the potential growth and the process of innovation. In so doing, as a more essential requirement for the improvement of corporate innovation and therefore corporate performance, it is important to fundamentally review corporate organizational structures, the status of human resources, and the systems and institutions that function as the infrastructure of markets. This project starts by focusing on corporate mergers and acquisitions, which intensify in recent years, to more fully examine the following questions:

• (1) What are the motives and intent of M&A activities? and
• (2) Are the initially anticipated effects of M&A realized, and does corporate performance actually improve after the completion of corporate reorganization?

In addition, countermeasures to hostile take-over bids and their implications will also be analyzed.

2006

Amid the global boom in corporate mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation since the 1990s, the number of such cases in Japan has been increasing rapidly since the latter half of the 1990s. In order to understand these developments it is essential to investigate fully (1) the motivations and intentions, and (2) whether the initially expected effects have occurred, and company performance has improved since reorganization. First, we will build a comprehensive M&A database that integrates microdata from basic studies of company activity with M&A information, and then conduct quantitative analyses in order to verify the above, while examining characteristics by industry and type. Also, as part of the creation of new research fields, we will establish a study group on the reform of the labor market system, for which the task will be to conduct interdisciplinary analyses, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, of ways in which to implement labor market reform in the future.