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...

Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of occasional...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...