Following the collapse of the Japanese financial bubble during the 1990s, Japanese corporations came to be saddled with increasingly large underfunded pension obligations. The gap between the level of retirement benefit promised and the market performance of retirement funds widened alarmingly,...

This study focuses on the stock market impact of Japanese corporate decisions to adopt pension plans. Implementing corporate pension plans in Japan is complicated because they are heavily regulated by the government and the traditional lump-sum-only severance benefit plans already exist,...