We examine the turnover of top executives in Japanese firms throughout the period from 1990 to 2013. During this time, the presence of a main bank has been weakened, the ownership of institutional investors has dramatically increased, and independent outside directors have been introduced in...

The wave of governance reforms that swept the country in the late 1990s has begun to shake up the boardrooms of Japanese corporations. Japanese companies' attitudes toward reform range broadly from actively receptive to very cautious. While attention is often focused on the importance of reforms...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of relationship banking in Japan, a country in which banks have assumed a more prominent role than that played by counterparts in other countries. First, we survey corporate finance trends for listed firms in the 1990s and present two puzzling...

Corporate governance reform has been one of the central issues in the "third arrow" of the Abe administration's economic revival program. The Japanese Stewardship Code was introduced in 2014, followed by the Corporate Governance Code in 2015. This study quantifies how the reform changed the...