Because of the unique corporate governance feature of mutual institutions, managers are expected to maximize their own interests at the expense of other stakeholders' interests. However, this study finds that managers of Japanese mutual banks do not behave as suggested

Since 2003, the Financial Services Agency has set relationship banking enhancement program as an important strategic task to improve the functions of regional financial institutions. In this enhancement program, the FSA recommended that regional financial institutions introduce new financial...

As the governance of financial institutions is becoming an important issue, there are many papers empirically investigating the governance issues of banks, which are stock companies. However, cooperative structured financial institutions (co-ops), which have a unique governance structure...