Firm specific information has a damped effect on business group firms' stock prices. Business group affiliated firms' idiosyncratic stock returns are less responsive to idiosyncratic commodity price shocks than are the idiosyncratic returns of otherwise similar unaffiliated firms in the same...

Economics has firms maximizing value and people maximizing utility, but firms are run by people. Agency theory concerns the mitigation of this internal contradiction in capitalism. Firms need charters, regulations and laws to restrain those entrusted with their governance, just as economies need...

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. This is the essence of the critique of family firms in...

The practice of adopting adults, even if one has biological children, makes Japanese family firms unusually competitive. Our nearly population-wide panel of postwar listed non-financial firms shows inherited family firms more important in postwar Japan than generally realized, and also...

The practice of adopting adults, even if one has biological children, makes Japanese family firms unusually competitive. Our nearly population-wide panel of postwar listed non-financial firms shows inherited family firms more important in postwar Japan than generally realized, and also...

From January 2011 through March 2018, the Bank of Japan purchased equity index ETFs worth about 3.5% of GDP. Identification of the effect of central bank ETF purchases on stock valuations and corporate responses is via differently-weighted and changing stock indices. BOJ purchases lift...

The fundamental unit of production in microeconomics is the firm, which mirrors reality in the United States and United Kingdom. But elsewhere, business groups can be the more important unit for business strategy; not the firm. We examine international joint ventures in the telecoms industry in...

Japan's corporate sector has, at different times in recent history, been organized according to every major model. Prior to World War II, wealth Japanese families locked in their control over large corporations by organizing them into pyramidal groups, called zaibatsu, similar to structures...

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. We argue that...

Shareholder valuations are economically and statistically positively correlated with independent directors' power, gauged by social network power centrality. Powerful independent directors' sudden deaths reduce shareholder value significantly; other independent directors' deaths do not. More...