Whither Japan's Corporate Governance

This paper examines the cumulative effects of gradual changes taking place in Japan's corporate landscape in general and corporate governance in particular in the past decade or so and regards it as an instance of institutional change which has not been completed yet. In order to substantiate this view, it first documents essential features of the changes and then interprets them using a game-theoretic framework of comparative corporate governance analysis. It identifies corporate governance institutions as multiple equilbria of game played between investors, managers and employees, and interprets the changes taking place in Japan as the transition from the model of Contingent Governance to that of stock market monitoring of complementary linkages between the managerial model and specific human assets of the firm