Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

EIJS Working Paper Series,
Stockholm School of Economics, The European Institute of Japanese Studies

No 202: A Lost Decade for Corporate Governance? What’s Changed, What Hasn’t, and Why

Curtis Milhaupt ()
Additional contact information
Curtis Milhaupt: Columbia University School of Law, Postal: Columbia University School of Law,, New York, New York

Abstract: Analysis of Japanese corporate law reveals a striking amount of formal institutional change in the past ten years, occurring at an ever-accelerating pace. This feature of law reform can be traced to a heightened awareness of the organizational straightjacket imposed on Japanese firms by the Commercial Code, and to a more competitive and market-responsive environment for the production of corporate law. It has been a “sea change decade” for Japanese corporate law. Yet it has been an ambiguous decade for Japanese corporate practices. Signs of change in response to the new institutional environment can be found in the areas of shareholder activism, corporate mergers and acquisitions and other organizational changes, board structure, and corporate finance. At the same time, however, domestic institutional investors remain passive, management remains largely insulated from the market for corporate control, and “lifetime” employment practices, while covering a shrinking subset of the Japanese workforce, remain firmly in place. This paper accounts for the observed pattern of change and non-change by analyzing the political economy of corporate law reform, the complementarities at work between corporate law and other institutions, and the relationship between corporate law and corporate governance. Ultimately, corporate law bears only a limited relationship to corporate governance. Changes in corporate practices are brought about by dynamics external to the formal corporate governance institutions. Thus, the sea change in Japanese corporate governance must await further changes in the distribution of shareholders, in the capital markets, and in the incentive structures for management, and the further erosion of corporate norms that promote employee and managerial interests over shareholder interests.

Keywords: Japan; corporate law; commercial code; corporate mergers; shareholder activism; board structure; outside directors; corporate finance; corporate governance; shareholder derivative suits; board of auditors; stock options.

JEL-codes: G34; G38; P16

35 pages, September 1, 2004

Full text files

eijswp0202.pdf PDF-file Full text

Download statistics

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Nanhee Lee ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

This page generated on 2024-02-05 17:11:10.