Berkshire Hathaway, among history's largest and most successful corporations, shuns middlemen; its chairman, the legendary investor Warren Buffett, excoriates financial intermediaries. The acquisitive conglomerate rarely borrows money, retains brokers, or hires consultants. Its governance is...

In Japan, since 2013, Japanese corporate governance reform has been developed by Japanese Government initiatives. This paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding what Japanese corporate governance reform means for Japanese companies by an application of agency theory. Corporate...

The problem of managerial agency costs dominates debates in corporate law. Many leading scholars advocate reforms that would reduce agency costs by forcing firms to allocate more control to shareholders. Such proposals disregard the costs that shareholders avoid by delegating control to managers...

Horizontal shareholdings exist when a common set of investors own significant shares in corporations that are horizontal competitors in a product market. Economic models show that substantial horizontal shareholdings are likely to anticompetitively raise prices when the owned businesses compete...

Although empirical studies show that common shareholding affects corporate conduct and that common horizontal shareholding lessens competition, critics have argued that the law should not take any action until we have clearer proof on the causal mechanisms. I show that we actually have ample...

Japanese corporate governance reform is implemented by an introduction of corporate governance code and stewardship code, in which stewardship activities by institutional investors play an important role in terms of reduction of agency cost. In this report, stewardship activities are focused...

This paper first sets a definition of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an extended model of corporate governance and then accounts for a voluntary approach to CSR, meant as voluntary compliance with CSR strategic management standards, in terms of an economic theory of self-regulation...

The discussion about employee representation on supervisory boards has received much attention from scholars and politicians around the world. We provide new insights to this ongoing debate by employing power indices from game theory to examine the "real" power of employees on boards and its...

This paper proposes a model of corporate control and oligopolistic competition under common ownership. Each firm’s conduct results from Nash bargaining (NB) among shareholders and firms play a Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains. NB encompasses a rich class of models of corporate control under...