After the burst of the "bubble" economy and the subsequent recession of the 1990's, a new era of M&A started in Japan. Following the deregulation in a number of non-tradable sectors, a relatively large number of foreign firms have entered the Japanese market, using M&As as a tool for market...

In recent years, the pattern of M&As in Japan has changed significantly. Increasingly, managers and owners of Japanese firms seem to have realized that there are efficiency benefits with M&As, and that there exist strategic dimensions in doing M&As. Almost on a daily basis, newspapers report on...

As Japan and the Nordic countries entered the final decade of the 20th century, they experienced an abrupt end to a near decade-long rapid surge in asset prices. An era of economic optimism was transformed into recession and a difficult cleaning-up process of the financial sector started....