Japan's prolonged economic problems are due to more than faulty macro-economic policies. We do not deny the importance of bungled macro-economic policy, but argue that deeper maladies in Japanese corporate governance made that country increasingly vulnerable to such problems.

Stock prices move together more in low-income economies than in high-income economies. This finding is clearly not due to market size differences, and only partially explained by slightly higher fundamentals correlation in low-income economies. However, measures of a country's institutionalized...

Weights in the Toronto Stock Exchange 300 index are determined by the market values of the included stocks' public floats. In November 1996, the exchange implemented a previously announced revision of its definition of the public float. This revision, which increased the floats and the index...

We use a simple real options framework and empirical data to establish that although Japanese banks hold borrowers’ shares, their interest is more aligned as a contractual claimant than a residual claimant of corporations. We then explain why the Japanese model of corporate governance was...

Opening up to global trade and investment is often thought to trigger institutional improvement by raising the expected benefits of institutional reform and reducing incumbents' incentives and ability to preserve the status quo. However, recent experience is not entirely consistent with this...

Opening up to global trade and investment is often thought to trigger institutional improvement by raising the expected benefits of institutional reform and reducing incumbents' incentives and ability to preserve the status quo. However, recent experience is not entirely consistent with this...

A corporation is an artificial person created for an economic purpose, as described in various aspects of the Theory of the Firm. Recent historical and comparative research shows that corporations in most countries come in groups, each controlled by a single principal. This has implications for...

Corporate governance disasters could often be averted had directors asked their CEOs questions, demanded answers, and blown whistles. Work in social psychology by Milgram (1974) and others shows human subjects to have an innate predisposition to obey legitimate authority. This may explain...

Using 550 million limit orders submitted in the Korea Stock Exchange, we estimate demand and supply elasticities of heterogeneous investor types and their changes around the Asian financial crisis. We find that domestic individuals have substantially more inelastic demand and supply curves than...