This paper summarizes the results of two questionnaires presented to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) by RIETI in February 2008 and February 2009. Given the limited data on SMEs, the purpose of the questionnaires is to understand the current status of financing for SMEs facing this...

RIETI recently conducted a comprehensive survey on corporate governance in Japan. It covers various topics concerning corporate governance and managerial practices such as managerial objectives, cross-shareholding, responses to shareholder's activism and hostile takeovers, executive compensation...

From around the last half of the 1990s, the proportion of bank-led workouts on debts held by troubled companies has been decreasing, while there has been a sharp rise in the number of cases of court-administered reorganization proceedings under the Corporate Reorganization Law or the Civil...

This paper examines the characteristics of companies prone to become the target of a hostile takeover by investment funds or of "shareholder activism" by comparing companies targeted by two investment funds - MAC Asset Management Inc. (better known as the Murakami Fund) and Steel Partners Japan...

Using the extensive microdata of the Credit Risk Database (CRD), established in 2001 by the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), in this paper we analyze the determinants for the life duration until legal bankruptcy of small and medium-size...

This paper examines whether commercial banks screen loan applications based on private information on firms' future profitability, and consequently how banks' ex-ante private information and screening decisions affect firms' ex-post profitability. Using a dataset of banks' loan application...