This paper suggests avenues for strengthening the governance and management of the Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the largest single pool of pension assets in the world. The GPIF earned its name in 2006 as part of a major governance reform that aimed at increasing the...

This paper reassesses the results of Japan‘s financial deregulation over the last two decades. Japan‘s Big Bang sought to transform a highly regulated bank-centered financial system to a transparent, market-centered financial system to revitalize Japan‘s economy and aging society. Prior...

This paper intends to scrutinize the Japan’s Corporate Governance Code from the perspective of its subtitle “sustainable growth of the company and improvement of medium- to long-term corporate value.” The first half of the paper focuses on the significance of this Code and related issues...

Economists have dominated U.S. scholarship about the S&L debacle and they have universally viewed the regulatory response as horrific. This paper argues that the conventional economic wisdom is badly flawed. The U.S. regulatory response to the debacle was disastrous – when economists shaped it...

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...

Hedge fund activism has been identified in the USA as a driver of enduring corporate governance change and market perception. We investigate this claim in an empirical study to see whether activism produced similar results in Japan in four representative areas: management effectiveness,...

The paper proposes two significant modifications of Japan's Act on Transfer of Bonds, Shares, etc. (BETA). First, it suggests the control agreement method of transferring an interest in securities that is effective against third parties. Under the BETA, the creation of an effective interest in...

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...

The relationship between the size and return of mutual funds has been a central interest from practical viewpoints. Using the substantial heterogeneity associated with the size of Japanese mutual funds over the early stage of their life cycle, which we call as "initial fund size anomaly", we...