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Center for Economic Institutions

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Center for Economic Institutions

Working Paper Series

Institute of Economic Research

Hitotsubashi University 2-1 Naka, Kunitachi, Tokyo, 186-8603 JAPAN

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CEI Working Paper Series, No. 2008-16

"Does Restructuring Pay in Japan? Evidence Following the Lost Decade"

July 2008

(Revised on Aug. 2009)

Dick Beason, Ken Gordon, Vikas Mehrotra and Akiko Watanabe

mailto:[email protected]�

Does Restructuring Pay in Japan?

Evidence Following the Lost Decade

Dick Beason

*, Ken Gordon

†, Vikas Mehrotra

‡,* and Akiko Watanabe

§

JEL classification: G34; J60

Keywords: Japanese corporate restructuring; restructuring announcement

* School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G2R6, phone: 780-492-2804; fax: 780-

492-9924; email: [email protected] † QI–CrossBorders, Tokyo, Japan; phone: 780-990-7982; fax: 780-492-9924; email: [email protected]

‡ School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G2R6, phone: 780-492-2457; fax: 780-

492-9924; email: [email protected] § School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G2R6, phone: 780-492-0385; fax: 780-

492-9924; email: [email protected] * Contact author.

mailto:[email protected]




Does Restructuring Pay in Japan?

Evidence Following the Lost Decade

Abstract

After over a decade of sluggish economic growth accompanied by massive fiscal stimulus and

government handouts (not unlike the response to the current global crisis) in the 1990s, it remains an

open question whether and how Japanese firms have restructured their operations, and whether these

efforts have borne any fruit. The popular consensus is that Japanese companies did start to implement

tough restructuring measures at the start of the 21st century, but there is little evidence describing the

scope and ultimate efficacy of such measures. Using a randomly selected sample of 300 firms from the

Tokyo Stock Exchange, we collect all restructuring announcement made in the aftermath of the so-

called lost decade, specifically in the 2000-2001 period. Our results are striking in that while we find

that firms engaging in restructuring of various sorts display improved earnings in the period following

the restructuring announcement, shareholders do not appear to benefit at the time of the restructuring

announcements. Our results are consistent with a model of corporate governance whereby the benefits

of restructuring accrue to fixed as opposed to residual claimants, sometimes referred to as a creditor-

centric corporate governance system.

I. Introduction

In this paper we find widespread evidence of restructuring among a randomly selected

group of 300 Japanese firms during our sample period of 2000-2001, a period of significant

prudential and accounting policy change. We choose this period because it follows the slow

growth ‘lost decade’ of the 1990’s in Japan, a period of major financial sector crisis resulting

from failures in prudential policy (much like the current American financial crisis), which

gave rise to strong incentives for Japanese firms to undertake restructuring measures. We find

significant improvements in firm performance using accounting measures of profitability

following restructuring announcements. While we do not find any significant stock returns

surrounding restructuring announcements, cumulative abnormal returns (CAR’s) at lower

frequencies show statistically significant, albeit economically small, improvements. Our

results are consistent with a model of corporate governance where the primary beneficiary of

restructuring announcements are fixed claimants, such as creditors, and where residual

claimants remain skeptical whether they will materially benefit from such restructuring efforts.

Distinctive contributions of this study include our choice of sample period at the heels

of a decade long economic slump in Japan, and an explicit recognition of the sample selection

bias associated with focusing on firms that choose to announce restructuring measures.

Indeed, an issue with empirical studies on corporate restructuring has been the tendency to

draw causal inferences from a sample of firms that chose to make restructuring

announcements. Second, while not the main focus of this paper, we believe that our study

offers useful insights into potential pitfalls of the present U.S. administration approach to

addressing the current financial crisis. Specifically, after a decade of financial window

dressing and Keynesian-style economic stimulus in Japan, meaningful restructuring

announcements from firms essentially came only after the Japanese government eased off on

showering firms with bailouts and push them toward greater transparency (Patterson and

Beason, 2001). Our study suggests that government infatuation with macroeconomic

stimulus measures may actually deter and delay meaningful changes at the firm level.

Corporate restructurings have been studied extensively in other locales. The literature

on corporate performance and restructurings in the U.S. deals with capital expansions

(McConnell and Muscarella 1985), asset disposal (John and Ofek, 1995), internal

reorganization (Brickley and Van Drunen, 1990), plant closings (Blackwell, et al, 1990), and

layoffs (Chen et al, 2001). Kang and Shivdasani (1997) consider restructuring and corporate

performance in Japan during the bubble period of 1986-1989. The results of this literature are

mixed. Sometimes restructuring measures appear to enhance shareholder returns or

performance, and sometimes they do not. If one wanted to make a broad generalization about

state of the literature, however, it would be to suggest that restructuring announcements

generally produce small but significant increases in returns, at least in the US market. On the

other hand, some types of announcements, such as layoffs, seem to generate negative returns.

This is likely due to the mixed information contained in the announcement, noise, test power

and issues of timing.

We believe ours is the first study to examine the behavior of firms following a

prolonged period of sluggish growth in a country not known for corporate restructuring. As

opposed to affecting a few firms (as in the Kang and Shivdasani, 1997, sample) this decade

long slowdown in the 1990s affected, to varying degrees, all firms in Japan. This gives us a

natural benchmark for comparison purposes – roughly 30% of our sample of 300 randomly-

selected firms made some sort of restructuring announcement during 2000-2001. The non-

announcing firms provide a natural benchmark against which to judge the efficacy of these

restructuring efforts.

We categorize restructuring announcements into six broad categories. These include

contraction-type actions (such as divestitures and consolidations), employment changes

(including workforce reductions), expansion-type actions (e.g., setting up production facilities

in lower-cost countries), internal reorganizations (such as streamlining production costs),

changes in internal control (e.g. CEO turnovers) and financial restructurings. Contraction-

type actions, employment changes and internal reorganizations involve retrenchments, and

represent approximately two-thirds of all restructuring announcements. Financial

restructurings and changes in internal control are relatively rarer events, representing 6% of

all announcements.

Our main results are that firms announcing restructuring programs experience an

improvement in operating earnings in the following year (as well as in the second year

following the announcement). More specifically, retrenchment actions are followed by

improvements in operating performance, while expansion actions are not. Financial

restructurings also result in performance improvements. These results are robust to outliers

and industry adjustments. When we control for other firm characteristics, as well as for the

performance change for non-announcing firms, the results for employment changes and

internal reorganizations remain significant, although the performance improvement for

contraction-type reorganizations are no longer significant.

We recognize that firms in our sample are not randomly assigned to the announcing

and non-announcing groups, and therefore the performance improvements associated with the

former may well be endogenous to the decision to embark on such restructuring programs.

We use a two-stage least squares (2-SLS) model to address this issue. We first model the

decision to announce as a function of foreign ownership under the assumption that foreigners

(mostly U.S. institutions) have generally been more active in pressuring management than

their Japanese counterparts. We then use the predicted value of the announcing probabilities

as a regressor in the second stage performance regressions. Our main results are robust to this

endogeneity correction. We note that prior studies on performance surrounding restructuring

announcements have not controlled for such endogeneity, leaving open the question of proper

identification of the second stage structural equation.

We repeat the tests for operating performance using announcement period stock

returns to examine whether market participants are able to anticipate the gains from

restructuring announcements for our sample of firms. Overall, these results are not significant.

It appears that shareholders in Japan are skeptical of the restructuring moves announced by

firms, perhaps on account of a decade long wait during which firms did little to address the

sluggish growth environment they faced. An alternative possibility is that the performance

improvements we document were indeed perceived as real and anticipated as such, but

shareholders remained doubtful if these gains would ever flow through to them as residual

claimants.

In the next section we describe in more detail the events of the 1990s that provide the

backdrop for the spate of restructuring announcements in 2000-2001. In section III, we

describe the sample selection process and our data sources. In section IV and section V, we

present the results on operating performance and stock returns. Section VI concludes this

paper.

II. Background on the 1990s – the “Lost Decade” in Japan

The 1990s represent a unique period in post-war Japan. For the first time in post-war

history, Japanese managers experienced a prolonged period of slow to negative growth, and,

unlike their Western counterparts, had little experience in dealing with such contractions,

especially after participating in the fast-paced growth of the 1980s. The asset pricing bubble

of the late 1980s resulted in further dislocations in the 1990s, especially the non-performing

loan banking crisis (with striking parallels to the global banking crises of the last two years),

and was followed by dramatically slower economic growth for the remainder of the decade.

Japanese firms were slow to respond to the crisis, waiting for improved economic growth and

government assistance rather than undertaking much needed restructuring.

By the mid-1990’s, however, it became clear that ‘growing out of the crisis’ was no

longer an option, and an increasing number of firms did begin to restructure, and a number of

very large firms went bankrupt. During the decade after the stock market crash the Japanese

economy and firms underwent significant transition. Foreign ownership quadrupled from

under 5% in 1990 to the end of our sample period in 2002 (Miyajima and Kuroki, 2006).

Finally from the mid 1990’s and into the first years of this century a number of restructuring

friendly measures were passed into law, and genuine restructuring on a broad scale finally

began. Since such changes form the basis of the motivation for this study, it is worth

considering them in some detail.1

Between 1993 and 1997 a number of major financial institutions experienced financial

difficulty, and the Ministry of Finance essentially admitted that it had been allowing financial

institutions to avoid reporting losses on real estate investments on the assumption that the real

estate market would recover. The lack of transparency and uncertainty regarding the

magnitude of the financial crisis resulted in the ‘Japan premium’2 reaching almost 1% in 1997

(see Peek and Rosengren, 2000).

By 1997 a number of prudential and accounting reforms were initiated that would help

promote corporate restructuring (or at least make monitoring of restructuring efforts by

1 See, for example ‘New Japan Part I,’ Warburg Dillon Read (Now UBS), 4 January 2000 for an extensive list of

restructuring announcements and accounting/prudential policy changes. 2 The term ‘Japan Premium’ as used in the business press typically referred to the premium on offshore interbank

overnight borrowing by Japanese banks of a certain risk class relative to foreign banks of a similar risk class.

shareholders simpler), improve the stability of the banking system through improved

prudential policy, and ultimately allow for improvements in corporate performance.

Significant changes in bank prudential policy began in 1995, spearheaded by the newly

created Financial Supervisory Agency (FSA). In 1997 the government formally recognized

that Japan’s bank centered financial system gave dominance to creditors over shareholders in

terms of monitoring, and that the Ministry of Finance’s (MOF) implicit guarantees that large

institutions would not fail exacerbated the moral hazard inherent in such a system. These

implicit guarantees were formally ended in 1997, and major accounting and prudential policy

changes were initiated. New accounting standards were announced between 1997 and 2000

to bring Japanese practices in line with international norms, with full implementation by 2000.

The major changes in the accounting standards relate to rules and reporting with respect to

consolidation, fair value definitions and accounting for pension liabilities and expense.

Taken together, the accounting reforms initially caused the measured performance of

parent firms to decline, putting pressure on many of the largest companies to restructure.

Specifically, by 2000 the combined impact of the accounting changes was to cause an

increase in shareholder equity (especially the accounting of cross shareholdings), leading to a

decline in (already pitiful) measures such as return on equity and return on assets (ROA). At

the same time, holdings by foreign institutional investors had been steadily rising throughout

the 1990’s, and these investors, unlike domestic institutions, were particularly concerned with

performance measures. Japanese companies that had been accustomed to just giving foreign

investors a tour of the factory floor became increasingly concerned with ways to increase

performance measures.

At the same time that prudential policy and accounting standards were upgraded, other

‘shareholder friendly’ measures were introduced. Share buybacks were allowed since 1996,

and steadily increased since then to our sample period. Corporate income taxes were steadily

slashed during the period up to 2000, by which time they had fallen from among the highest

in the world to equivalent to those paid by firms in California. The decades old ban on

holding companies, introduced by General MacArthur, was finally repealed in 1997. While

this at first sight might appear benign or negative, it is actually an important ingredient in

Japanese restructuring. For the non-financial sector it provides a vehicle for parent firms to

hold subsidiaries and affiliates in a more arms-length relationship, adding them or shedding

them as the need arises, rather than the messy and difficult to sever cross shareholding

mechanism. For financial firms, it allowed for the necessary mechanism to enable mergers,

and also for parent firms to enter other business lines without necessarily straying from their

core competency.

While conventional wisdom maintains that Japanese firms are seriously constrained

from undertaking significant restructuring due to rigid labor practices, such as the difficulty of

large firms to layoff or fire workers (except in cases of financial exigency), some progress has

been made in that area. The easiest way for large firms to shed labor is to rely more heavily

on ‘part time’ employees, whose hours can be reduced or eliminated easily. ‘Part time’ in

large Japanese firms is often very close to full time, the major distinction simply being

classified as such (Beason, 1992).

It is against this background that we have chosen the period spanning 2000 and 2001

for our observations.

III. Sample and Restructuring Announcement Characteristics

We randomly selected 300 TSE1 firms from a current total of 1743 TSE1 firms. We

exclude consideration of firms in the financial sector due to the incomparability of

performance data for such firms relative to the rest of the sample. There are other reasons for

excluding financial sector firms, including the fact that restructuring measures in that sector

are often quite different from other sectors, and have often included radical transformations

including de-listing of the original entity. Firms from all other industry groupings in the TSE

are represented. For our sample period of 2000-2001, some of the selected firms had to be

eliminated either because they were newly listed during or after our sample period, or were

not traded for significant periods. After such eliminations, 289 firms remained from our

original sample of 300. Among these firms, 90 made restructuring announcements during the

sample period for a total of 836 such announcements.

Restructuring announcements were found by searching for all newspaper articles and

announcements for the sample of 300 firms in the Nihon Keizai Shinbum, Japan’s major

business and financial daily. This was accomplished by using the ‘C-brain’ online search and

research service from the same source. We then grouped these into 45 restructuring

announcement types within 6 major categories. We have used all announcements during the

period, rather than selecting only certain types of announcements as is typically the case in

this literature.

While we included every type of restructuring announcement made by our sample of

firms during FY2000-2001, we have categorized them in a fashion that makes comparison

with previous studies possible. In particular, we were able to group announcement types into

categories that are comparable to those of Kang and Shivdasani (1997), a study that examined

restructuring during the bubble period of the late 1980s. While comparison of our results with

those of Kang and Shivdasani is interesting, it should be noted that their 1980s bubble period

is very different from our sample period for a number of important reasons. As noted earlier,

accounting standards and transparency were radically different, and economic conditions were

much stronger with fewer firms subject to financial fragility. Furthermore, Japan in the late

1980’s was at the zenith of its bank centered financial system, and restructurings were largely

undertaken at the behest of creditors, rather than being management driven.3

The full list of announcement types and frequencies studied is presented in Table 1.

We consider six major categories of announcement types: contraction actions, employment

changes, expansion actions, internal reorganization actions, changes in internal control and

financial restructuring. We further consider breakdowns within each of these categories for a

total of 45 detailed restructuring action announcement types. Our list of categories is among

the most comprehensive in the literature.

Among the six major types of restructuring announcements, contraction measures,

employment changes and internal organization measures can generally be viewed as cost

reduction or cost control measures. Internal control and financial restructurings are typically

governance related changes, though they may have cost and other performance implications

as well. Expansion measures include foreign expansions that may result in production cost

reduction, and also includes expansion of marketing networks that may result in increased

sales revenue or improved sales turnover. Generally, other studies have found that

restructuring announcements yield small positive response in returns, though with limited or

no response in firm performance after such announcements (Brickley and Van Drunen, 1990).

The exception to this finding seems to be in the case of layoffs in the U.S., where Chen, et al

(2001) find a negative impact of such announcements on returns, presumably due to signaling

issues discussed earlier.

3 For example, after the first oil shock in the mid-1970’s, Mazda’s main bank (Sumitomo Bank) carried out a

full-scale restructuring of the firm, including replacement of top management. In the mid-1990’s, after the main

bank system began to crumble and the large Japanese banks found themselves in trouble, other shareholding

groups began to flex their muscle. In the Mazda case, Ford Motor Co. became the de-facto monitor of the

company and initiated radical restructuring. More generally, see Aoki, Patrick and Sheard (1994).

IV. Restructuring Announcements and Operating Performance

Naturally, we would like to test whether the observed list of announcements from our

sample of firms has had a positive impact on firm performance and returns. A casual reading

of the business press would suggest that market participants in Japan during our sample

period were highly skeptical and weary.4 For most of the first decade following the collapse

of the bubble economy in Japan, Japanese firms were very leery of making restructuring

announcements. Stakeholder rights rather than shareholder rights were paramount, and

managers of large firms were protected from takeover by cross-shareholdings. Restructuring

was associated with layoffs and considered ‘un-Japanese.’ Case law in Japan effectively

prevented layoffs in large firms except in the case of financial exigency.5 Government, for its

part, tried to convince the populace and market participants that economic recovery was on its

way. Given this history, one can understand that there might have been skepticism on the part

of shareholders as to whether restructuring announcements would actually pay off in terms of

firm performance. We can model the tests of these hypotheses a number of ways. We are

concerned with the potential impact of restructuring announcements on firm performance and

returns, so we must define two basic ‘models’ of such impacts and define our performance

measures.

Our first measure of performance is ROA, defined as operating income scaled by book

assets. ROA captures two key component ratios of performance, sales turnover and margin,

4 See, for e.g., ‘Corporate Japan’s Stealth Makeover,’ Businessweek, September 29 2003; and ‘Barbarians at the

gate, vultures overhead,’ Asia Times Online, September 23 2003.

5 Contrary to popular belief, layoffs and dismissals are not illegal in Japan, but a long history of case law,

together with specificity of human capital, has made them costly. Generally speaking, firms with more than 10

employees are expected to avoid layoffs through reduction of hours for non-tenured employees (Beason, 1992).

This has been reaffirmed in several court rulings, including the Shuhoku Bus Case (1968), the Toyo Sanso Co.

Case (1979) and the SAS case (1995).

as shown in the decomposition below (where EBIT refers to Earnings Before Interest and

Taxes, or operating income):

Assets

Sales

Sales

EBITROA (1)

ROA is not influenced by extraordinary items and financing charges, and represents

asset efficiency and profitability. Since we are concerned with how restructuring affects

performance, and we focus on the change in ROA over a one (as well as two) year horizon

after the restructuring announcement (vis-à-vis a year before the announcement).

Specifically, we estimate the following equation where the R terms represent the six

restructuring announcement categories, and the I terms correspond to two-digit industry codes.

The C terms represent control variables such as foreign ownership. On the basis of this

mapping, we hypothesize the following baseline model for our statistical analysis.

icc

k

kk

r

rri CIRROA

7

1

6

1

(2)

In (2), ΔROA is measured as the one or two year change in ROA. The one (two) year

change is the change in ROA from one (two) year before the announcement until one year

after. The announcements will be considered on the basis of the individual announcement

types and a single variable capturing all announcements. Industry dummies are the seven

non-financial four-digit ticker codes in the TSE1. The model for performance is essentially

an event-type analysis on whether the defined performance variable for the announcing firms

responds to an announcement of restructuring in period 0. The null hypothesis for equation

(2) is that the coefficients on announcements are individually equal to zero (we can remain

agnostic with respect to the sum of coefficients).

Of course, it may take the firm many periods to respond positively or negatively to an

announced restructuring measure. We have found that the results are robust to lag structure,

and we have reported the one year change measure. The results in terms of restructuring

announcements and performance are quite ubiquitous; firms in Japan for the period under

analysis seem to deliver on restructuring announcements. We can see this in stylized fashion

in Table 2, where announcement types and changes in industry adjusted ROA are presented.

Contractions, employment changes, internal reorganizations and financial restructuring type

announcements are positively related with improvements in ROA. Category ‘ALL’ here is a

simple dummy variable representing whether firms made any of the six categories of

announcements. The significance of this variable for industry adjusted mean and median

ROA is not as large, since it includes the impact of expansion and internal control type

restructuring announcements as well. Apparently expansion activities and internal control

changes during this period were not positively correlated with higher industry adjusted

performance.

With 90 firms out of the random sample of 300 firms making over 800 restructuring

announcements, it is obvious that firms are announcing and undertaking multiple restructuring

actions. In Table 3 we present the correlation coefficients between the six major

announcement types. Perhaps not surprisingly, categories which are individually positively

correlated with improvements in ROA tend to be positively and significantly correlated with

each other. Categories which appear to be uncorrelated with improvements in ROA

(categories Expansion and Internal Control Changes) tend to be negatively correlated or

uncorrelated to all other restructuring announcements with the exception of expansions, which

are positively correlated to internal reorganizations. Overall, announcements of the type that

are found to be positively correlated with performance improvements are correlated with each

other. Managers seem to try several types of actions in an effort to improve firm performance.

In Table 4 we present our findings with respect to a specification of model (2). We

model changes in ROA as a function of the six categories of announcement type, the seven

industry/ticker categories, and percent of foreign ownership. Foreign ownership is included

under the assumption that firms with greater foreign ownership are more likely to introduce

performance enhancing measures.

We have estimated (2) using both one and two period changes in ROA for robustness,

although we only discuss and tabulate the one-period change in ROA to conserve space. As

in the univariate correlations, employment reductions and cost reducing internal

organizational changes contribute to improvement in both one and two-period changes in

ROA. Category 1 contraction-type actions and category 6 financial restructuring do not have

a statistically significant impact on changes in ROA in the multivariate analysis. A possible

explanation for this comes from the results in Table 3: there is a significant degree of

correlation between these two announcement types. This collinearity will bias against finding

a statistically significant impact of announcements on improvements in ROA. Our attempts

to deal with this issue do not conflict with the results of Table 4, except to enhance the impact

of category 2 announcements, employment changes.

The inclusion of foreign ownership in Table 4 was an indirect way of dealing with an

inherent issue of endogeneity. That is, our results are for firms that have made restructuring

announcements, meaning that they are conditional on the decision to make such

announcements. While this is precisely the issue we are concerned with, whether the decision

to make such an announcement positively affects performance, we must attempt to deal with

this potential endogeneity issue as a robustness check. Failure to do so may simply reflect

that announcing firms are simply better firms, and better firms are more likely to make

restructuring announcements. To address this issue, we use a 2SLS approach with the

decision to announce is modeled as a function of observable variables, then using fitted values

from the first stage as explanatory variables in the regression on performance. Specifically,

the 2SLS model we employ is:

itii ROAcFOREIGNbaC ,1..ˆ (3)

INDfCedROA .ˆ. (4)

In (3), the first stage of the 2SLS model, we model the decision to announce, Ĉ, as a

function of the percentage of foreign ownership and pre-announcement change in ROA. The

logic here is that the percentage of foreign ownership is an observable (to the econometrician)

proxy for outsider pressure (pro-shareholder), and pre-announcement change in ROA

represents both market and insider pressures for enhanced performance. In the second stage,

the fitted values for the announcement decision from (3) are used as the primary explanatory

variable for changes in ROA subsequent to the announcement, with industry or ticker

categories used as control variables. This model allows us to avoid the endogeneity issue that

announcing firms may simply be ‘better firms’ by conditioning on governance and past

performance. While the endogeneity issue could also be dealt with via a ‘Heckman’ type

correction, econometricians (e.g., Johnston and DiNardo, 1997) have largely abandoned this

approach due to sensitivity of results with respect to specification which bias toward favoring

the null hypothesis. The results of the first and second stage regressions represented in (3)

and (4) are presented in Table 5.

The results of the 2SLS analysis are consistent with the unconditional results presented

earlier. From the second stage, improvements in ROA are enhanced by announcement

decisions. From the first stage, the decision to announce is positively related to the

observable governance variable (percentage of foreign ownership) and inversely related to

past performance (ROA in the fiscal year prior to the restructuring announcement). These

results support our earlier conclusions that restructuring announcements are indeed positively

related to improvement in corporate performance.

V. Restructuring Announcements and Returns

As discussed at the outset of this paper, we are also interested in the question of

whether restructuring announcements by firms have a significant impact on returns. The

question is of interest in terms of international comparisons, but there are important market

specific reasons for examining the issue in the Japanese context. Generally speaking,

restructuring announcements have small, short-term positive impact on returns in the context

of the U.S. market. There are exceptions, and some announcements tend to give mixed

signals, such as layoff announcements (see Chen, et al, 2001). The general finding of small

positive impact on returns gives rise to the question of whether firms might consider making

restructuring announcements that are pure window dressing, simply for the sake of boosting

short-term returns.

This question is particularly interesting in the Japanese context, and is an issue often

raised by market participants. That is, given the lengthy period of poor economic

performance, and poor performance by most firms in Japan specifically, might firms in that

context consider making restructuring announcements in order to help boost returns, having

observed the U.S. experience? While the Japanese context is not so simple, in that

restructuring announcements were initially avoided by firms for a very long period after the

market and economic collapse began in late 1989, it is certainly plausible that managers in

Japan might be tempted to follow such a course. Such policies may not have the desired

effect, however, for two reasons. First, shareholders may be skeptical about the sincerity of

the measures, or they might believe that they will not be the beneficiaries. That is, the

restructuring process will stop at a stage that benefits only the fixed claimants, essentially

shutting the residual claimants out. Such a finding would be consistent with the creditor-

centric corporate governance view of Japan (Morck and Nakamura, 1999).

In this paper, we have already addressed the issue of substance: for our sample and

period of analysis, restructuring announcements as a whole do boost firm performance.

Furthermore, specific types of restructuring announcements, especially those related to cost

control, do positively affect firm performance as measured by improvements in ROA in a

statistically significant fashion. For our purposes here, therefore, the only question which

remains is whether in fact our skeptical market participants are willing to pay for such

announcements. Specifically, do restructuring announcements in Japan for the period of

analysis boost returns in a statistically significant fashion?

In Table 6 we consider the relation between the six major restructuring categories, as

well as the overall announcement dummy variable, and three returns measures. In this table,

the interval [-1, +2] indicates returns measured from one day prior to an announcement to two

days after the announcement, and so forth. The results are generally not significant, with only

expansion activity announcements (category 3) showing even modest positive impact at the

usual levels of significance across all time periods. On the basis of these univariate results, it

does not appear that the market is generally prepared to reward firms for making restructuring

announcements. Indeed, if anything, market participants are more prepared to reward growth

related announcements than typical restructuring announcements.

We must consider a fully controlled model for returns and restructuring

announcements before we can formally conclude that the market is unwilling to pay for

restructuring announcements. Our basic model here assumes a mapping between

restructuring announcements and returns. The logic is just the extension of the relationship

between restructuring announcements and performance outlined in equations (1)-(3). If

restructuring enhances performance, then we hypothesize that restructuring announcements

should enhance returns. The model to be tested is presented in equation (5), with the null

hypothesis that the coefficients on restructuring announcements should be statistically

insignificant.

icc

k

kk

r

rrii CIRMKTRET

7

1

6

1

. (5)

Results of estimating (5), using both market-adjusted returns (based on the TOPIX

Index) and raw returns with the TOPIX Index return as an explanatory variable, are presented

in Table 7. None of the announcement categories appear to enhance returns. Despite the

previous evidence presented, that restructuring announcements do indeed appear to enhance

performance, we cannot generally reject the null hypothesis that such announcements do not

positively impact returns. While we present only the 2-day announcement return regressions

in Table 7, the results were robust with respect to other returns windows. The relation

between expansion measures and returns disappears in the multivariate analysis, suggesting a

spurious correlation. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, market participants in the Japanese

market are not typically willing to ante up for restructuring announcements, despite evidence

that such activities positively affect firm performance. Despite meaningful reforms in terms

of accounting practices and transparency, market participants in the immediate post-reform

and post-tech bubble period appear to be skeptical about restructuring announcements by

Japanese firms.

We can think of a number of reasons why short-term returns in an event study

framework may fail to respond to restructuring announcements. Turning the issue on its head,

one may argue that short-term returns in the event framework typically do respond in the US

context because credibility and an active takeover mechanism in that context generally leads

management to make good on such announcements. As outlined in the introduction, the role

of insiders and the sluggish pace of restructuring in the 1990’s, combined with poor

prudential policy could have conditioned agents (outsiders) to be skeptical of such

announcements. If this leads agents to adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude, the response in returns

in a short-term event framework might be negligible, whereas longer window cumulative

returns might improve as measures are actually implemented and performance improves.

Naturally, given our findings that some restructuring measures do indeed enhance

performance, we need to examine whether longer-window returns improve. In Table 8 we

present the univariate correlations between restructuring announcements and CAR’s measured

at the 12 month, 24 month and 36 month windows. Given the Bank of Japan’s zero interest

rate or near zero interest rate policy that prevailed during this period, we are not overly

concerned with issues of discounting, so the CAR measures used are raw undiscounted data.

As can be seen, the shorter window is not consistent with improved returns in response to the

restructuring announcements. This is hardly surprising, if the environment is indeed one of

‘wait and see,’ since improvements in performance take time to gel. We believe 24 months is

a reasonable period for all of the implementation and performance delays to work through,

and this is consistent with our performance findings. Longer windows, such as 36 months,

are generally consistent with the 24 month window.

In broad brush, the 24 and 36 month CAR results are consistent with those for

performance: restructuring announcements are positively correlated with improvement in

performance and improvement in CAR’s. By contrast, performance improves in response to

contraction announcements and changes in employment policy as well as internal

reorganization announcements in the simple correlations, and in response to employment

changes and internal reorganization in the OLS framework, but 24 month CAR’s respond to

employment changes, internal control changes and financial restructuring.

We repeated the CAR analysis in a multivariate framework. However the coefficients

on restructuring announcements were not statistically significant, and are not reported here.

We believe the insignificant results are due to significant collinearity among the

announcement variables. We were not successful in rectifying the problem using standard

corrections for multicollinearity. Overall, we are not confident that the univariate results for

CAR’s and announcements are robust, and that evidence linking restructuring and returns

appears weak.

VII. Conclusions

In this paper we considered restructuring announcements in the Japanese business

press for 300 randomly selected firms from the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

We found that 90 firms from that sample made over 800 restructuring announcements. We

grouped these announcements into six major categories, namely contraction events, employment

changes, expansion actions, internal reorganizations, internal control changes and financial

restructurings. We first considered the issue of whether firms that made such announcements

had improvements in performance as measured by ROA. We found that restructuring plans

involving cutting back production or employment, internal reorganization (often with similar

motives), and financial restructurings were associated with positive and significant

improvements in ROA. This finding was robust to lag structure.

We also considered the relationship between restructuring announcements and returns.

We found no evidence for a positive relationship between announcements of restructuring

activities and returns. This finding was in stark contrast to the results found for restructuring

and performance. Despite significant improvements in governance and accounting

regulations after 2000, it appears that market participants remain skeptical of firm-level

efforts to generate meaningful reforms.

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1. Contraction Actions: 236 Asset sales (sales of subsidiary shares/operation units/real estate) - Divestitures 60 Spinoff unit - Divestitures 16 Cut/postpone capital expenditures (infrastructure/equipment investments) 5 Withdraw from line of production/business operation 29 Cut production/production capacity (mostly domestic) 25 Suspend production operations (mostly domestic) 6 Consolidate subsidiaries/production plants/operation units/offices/branches 64 Close domestic production plants/operation units/offices/branches 22 Close oversea production plants/operation units/offices/branches 9 2. Employment Changes: 123 Domestic layoffs 20 Oversea layoffs 13 Temporary layoffs (mostly domestic) 8 Employee transfer / secondment (to different subsidiaries/plants/operation units) 33 Reduce director/executive salary/bonus 7 Reduce manager salary/bonus 5 Reduce employee salary/bonus 4 Performance-based salary/bonus/pension for managers/employees 8 Recruit for voluntary early retirement / offer early retirement incentives 25 3. Expansion Actions: 250 Increase domestic production 4 Increase overseas production 47 Expand distribution channels 10 Setup new plants/operation units/distribution channels or start new line of production/business operation 40 Establish subsidiary 13 Increase capital expenditures 30 Joint venture or strategic alliance / business and capital tie-up 70 M&A (Merger via increased cross holdings and acquisitions 29 Partial acquisition (acquisition of units/divisions) 7 4. Internal Reorganization Actions: 173 Cut production/operating costs 75 Modernize/improve production techniques/equipments/facilities 8 Lower inventory 8 Shift/change product line 6 Reorganize existing production process/operation units 42 Improve product distribution efficiency 22 Outsource part of production/operation 9 Change pricing policy (increase product price) 3 5. Changes in Internal Control: 26 External directors/supervisors 6 Appointed executives 5 Turnover of CEO (resignation, reduction in number of CEO, new appointment) 6 Improve governance (more frequent management meetings, setup of supervisory board, increase accounting transparency) 9 6. Financial Restructurings: 28 Reduce/terminate cross holdings 4 Main banks grant write-offs of company loans 3 Bond issue 3 Write off of non-performing assets (loans to subsidiaries) 2 Receive financial support from main banks 1 Report special loss arising from restructuring costs 15

Table 1 Restructuring announcements made by a random sample of 300 firms listed on the first tier of the Tokyo Stock

Exchange in 2000-2001. A total of 90 firms made 836 announcements over this time period.

Table 2

Industry adjusted mean and median one period change in Return on Assets (ROA)

ROA is calculated as Earnings Before Interest and Taxes divided by Total Assets. Change in

ROA is calculated as the difference between ROA at the end of the first fiscal year following the

restructuring announcement and the ROA at the end of the fiscal year preceding the

announcement. Industry adjusted ROA is calculated as ROA for the firm less the median ROA

for all firms belonging to the same two-digit industry code matched by fiscal year. A total of 836

restructuring plans, classified into six broad categories, were announced by 90 firms from a

randomly selected sample of 300 firms over the 2000-2001 period. P-values are provided in

parentheses.

Restructuring Action Mean Median

Contraction 0.0096

(0.001)

0.0036

(0.001)

Employment changes 0.0123

(0.0004)

0.0036

(0.001)

Expansion -0.0031

(0.29)

-0.0014

(0.33)

Internal Reorganization 0.0095

(0.0003)

0.0036

(0.0006)

Changes to Internal control -0.0021

(0.73)

0.0000

(0.62)

Financial restructuring 0.0225

(0.0008)

0.0205

(0.0001)

ALL 0.0042

(0.012)

0.0011

(0.005)

Table 3

Pair-wise correlations for restructuring announcements

Pair-wise correlation coefficients for restructuring announcements made by a random sample of

300 firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange over the 2000-2001 period. A total of 836

announcements of various types were made by 90 firms from the sample of 300 firms over this

period. The restructuring announcements are classified into six types. C1 refers to Contraction

type events. C2 refers to employment changes. C3 refers to expansion actions. C4 refers to

internal reorganizations. C5 refers to internal control changes. C6 refers to financial

restructurings. P-values are provided in parentheses.

C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6

C1 1.0 .233

(.0001)

-.117

(.0039)

.23

(.0001)

-.046

(.254)

.101

(.013)

C2 .233

(.0001)

1.0 -.15

(.0002)

.163

(.0001)

-.031

(.4429)

.217

(.0001)

C3 -.117

(.0039)

-.151

(.0002)

1.0 .114

(.005)

-.08

(.049)

-.119

(.0033)

C4 .23

(.0001)

.163

(.0001)

.114

(.005)

1.0 -.015

(.71)

-.02

(.621)

C5 -.046

(.254)

-.031

(.443)

-.08

(.049)

-.015

(.71)

1.0 -.041

(.315)

C6 .101

(.013)

.217

(.0001)

-.119

(.0033)

-.02

(.621)

-.041

(.315)

1.0

Table 4

Restructuring announcements and changes in ROA: OLS regression estimates

Regression of change (one and two period) in ROA on restructuring announcements, industry

dummy variables and foreign ownership. One (two) period ROA changes are measured as the ROA

at the end of the first (second) fiscal year following the restructuring less the ROA from one fiscal

year prior to the restructuring announcement. C1 refers to Contraction type events. C2 refers to

employment changes. C3 refers to expansion actions. C4 refers to internal reorganizations. C5

refers to internal control changes. C6 refers to financial restructurings. P-values are provided in

parentheses.

Dependent

Variable

One period

change in

ROA

Two-period

change in

ROA

Constant -0.009 (0.13) 0.0093 (0.15)

C1 0.006 (0.16) -0.0013 (0.85)

C2 0.009 (0.07) 0.014 (0.03)

C3 0.0007 (0.87) -0.0013 (0.81)

C4 0.015 (0.002) 0.015 (0.01)

C5 -0.002 (0.73) -0.013 (0.32)

C6 0.002 (0.79) -0.002 (0.78)

% Foreign 0.037 (0.07) 0.0022 (0.95)

Industry Dummies YES YES

Adj. R-sq

F-stat

0.172

3.070

0.144

2.680

Table 5

Change in ROA following restructuring announcements:

2-stage least squares regression estimates

Panel A presents OLS estimates of the decision to announce a restructuring plan. Fitted

values of the decision to announce (C_hat) are used as explanatory variables in the second

stage OLS regression of the change in ROA following the restructuring announcement. A

total of 836 restructuring plans were announced by 90 firms from a randomly selected

sample of 300 firms over the 2000-2001 period.

Panel A: First stage OLS estimates of the decision to announce as a function of foreign

ownership and pre-announcement ROA measured at the end of the last full fiscal year

preceding the restructuring announcement. Foreign Ownership is fraction of equity held by

non-Japanese institutions. Individual ownership is domestic holdings by individuals (not

cross-held). P-values in parentheses.

Constant 0.81136 (0.0001)

Foreign Ownership

Individual Ownership 4.76098

-2.40590

(0.0001)

(0.0001)

Pre-Restructuring ROA -4.03748 (0.0001)

Adj. R-sq 0.3522

F-statistic 87.63

Panel B: Second stage OLS estimates: Post announcement change in ROA as a function of

fitted value of the decision to announce (C_hat) and industry category. ROA change is

measured as the difference in the ROA at the end of the first (second) fiscal year following

the restructuring and the ROA from one fiscal year prior to the restructuring announcement.

P-values in parentheses.

One Period Change in ROA Two Period Change in ROA

Constant -0.0165 (0.0001) -0.00555 (0.315)

C_hat 0.03073 (0.0001) 0.0210 (0.0001)

Industry Dummies YES YES

Adj R-sq 0.1552 0.109

F-statistic 11.98 8.33

Table 6

Restructuring announcements and stock returns

Announcement dates are based on reports in the Nihon Keizai Shinbum. A total

of 836 restructuring plans were announced by 90 firms from a randomly selected

sample of 300 firms over the 2000-2001 period. All returns are adjusted for

market using the TOPIX Index. P-values are provided in parentheses.

Event type Day [-1,2] Day [-1,1] Day [-1,0]

Contractions -0.0089 -0.0045 0.002

(0.4) (0.56) (0.71)

Employment Changes -0.046 -0.027 -0.011

(0.08) (0.2) (0.48)

Expansions 0.019 0.017 0.015

(0.08) (0.05) (0.09)

Internal Reorganizations -0.008 -0.007 0.004

(0.68) (0.67) (0.68)

Internal Control Changes 0.019 0.012 0.01

(0.47) (0.45) (0.49)

Financial Restructurings 0.0067 0.01 0.008

(0.59) (0.24) (0.36)

ALL -0.0067 -0.0019 0.003

(0.49) (0.81) (0.59)

Table 7

Restructuring announcements and returns: OLS Regression Estimates

Market-adjusted as well as raw returns are measured over three days centered on the restructuring

announcement date. Market-adjusted returns are calculated by subtracting the return on the TOPIX

Index. %Foreign refers to equity ownership by foreign institutions. Industry fixed Effects are based

on two-digit industry classifications. P-values are presented in parentheses.

Dependent variable Market-adjusted Return Raw Return

Constant -0.016 (0.51) -0.016 (0.53)

TOPIX Return 0.87 (0.05)

%Foreign 0.05 (0.44) 0.048 (0.47)

Contraction-type Events 0.016 (0.24) 0.016 (0.25)

Employment Changes -0.018 (0.23) -0.019 (0.22)

Expansion Events 0.022 (0.15) 0.022 (0.15)

Internal Reorganizations 0.0004 (0.77) 0.004 (0.77)

Internal Control Changes 0.008 (0.73) 0.007 (0.76)

Financial Restructurings 0.017 (0.52) 0.019 (0.49)

Industry Fixed Effects YES YES

Adj. R-sq -0.034 0.019

F-stat 0.81 1.11

Table 8

Restructuring announcements and CAR’s

Announcement dates are based on reports in the Nihon Keizai Shinbum. A total

of 836 restructuring plans were announced by 90 firms from a randomly selected

sample of 300 firms over the 2000-2001 period. CARs represent market-adjusted

cumulative returns using the TOPIX Index. Time in brackets is measured in

months [from, to]. P-values are provided in parentheses.

Event type Period [0,12] Period [0,24] Period [0,36]

Contractions .109 0.324 0.408

(0.08) (0.000) (0.000)

Employment Changes -0.046 0.301 0.232

(0.66) (0.000) (0.028)

Expansions -.026 0.175 0.247

(0.69) (0.11) (0.05)

Internal Reorganizations -0.160 -0.177 -0.167

(0.35) (0.41) (0.47)

Internal Control Changes 0.126 0.314 0.394

(0.16) (0.004) (0.001)

Financial Restructurings 0.010 0.226 0.468

(0.97) (0.000) (0.13)

ALL .044 0.226 0.298

(0.35) (0.000) (0.000)

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from the collapse of Thai financial institutions”, September 2004. 2004-17 Chaiyasit Anuchitworawong, “Ownership-based Incentives, Internal Corporate Risk and

Firm Performance”, September 2004. 2004-18 Jack Ochs and In-Uck Park, “Overcoming the Coordination Problem: Dynamic Formation

of Networks”, September 2004. 2004-19 Hidenobu Okuda and Suvadee Rungsomboon, “Comparative Cost Study of Foreign and

Thai Domestic Banks 1990–2002: Estimating Cost Functions of the Thai Banking Industry,” February 2005.

2004-20 Hidenobu Okuda and Suvadee Rungsomboon, ”The Effects of Foreign Bank Entry on the

Thai Banking Market: Empirical Analysis from 1990 to 2002,“ March 2005.

WP-6

2004-21 Juro Teranishi, “Investor Right in Historical Perspective: Globalization and the Future of the Japanese Firm and Financial System,” March 2005.

2004-22 Kentaro Iwatsubo, “Which Accounts for Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations, Deviations from

the Law of One Price or Relative Price of Nontraded Goods?”, March 2005. 2004-23 Kentaro Iwatsubo and Tomoyuki Ohta, ”Causes and effects of exchange rate regimes (in

Japanese),” March 2005. 2004-24 Kentaro Iwatsubo, “Bank Capital Shocks and Portfolio Risk: Evidence from Japan,” March

2005. 2004-25 Kentaro Iwatsubo, “On the Bank-led Rescues Financially Distressed Firms in Japan,” March

2005. 2005-1 Yishay P. Yafeh and Tarun Khanna, “Business Groups in Emerging Markets: Paragons or

Parasities?,” September 2005. 2005-2 Renee B. Adams and Daniel Ferreira, “Do Directors Perform for Pay?," September 2005. 2005-3 Qun Liu, Shin-ichi Fukuda and Juro Teranishi, “What are Characteristics of Financial

Systems in East Asia as a Region?.” September 2005. 2005-4 Juro Teranishi, “Is the Financial System of Postwar Japan Bank-dominated or Market

Based?,” September 2005. 2005-5 Hasung Jang, Hyung-cheol Kang and Kyung Suh Park, “Determinants of Family

Ownership: The Choice between Control and Performance,” October 2005. 2005-6 Hasung Jang, Hyung-cheol Kang and Kyung Suh Park, “The Choice of Group Structure:

Divide and Rule,” October 2005. 2005-7 Sangwoo Lee, Kwangwoo Park and Hyun-Han Shin, “The Very Dark Side of International

Capital Markets: Evidence from Diversified Business Groups in Korea,” October 2005. 2005-8 Allen N. Berger, Richard J. Rosen and Gregory F. Udell, “Does Market Size Structure

Affect Competition? The Case of Small Business Lending,” November 2005. 2005-9 Aditya Kaul and Stephen Sapp, “Trading Activity and Foreign Exchange Market Quality,”

November 2005. 2005-10 Xin Chang, Sudipto Dasgupta and Gilles Hilary, “The Effect of Auditor Choice on

Financing Decisions,” December 2005. 2005-11 Kentaro Iwatsubo, “Adjustment Speeds of Nominal Exchange Rates and Prices toward

Purchasing Power Parity,” January 2006. 2005-12 Giovanni Barone-Adesi, Robert Engle and Loriano Mancini, “GARCH Options in

Incomplete Markets”, March 2006. 2005-13 Aditya Kaul, Vikas Mehrotra and Blake Phillips, “Ownership, Foreign Listings, and Market

Valuation”, March 2006. 2005-14 Ricard Gil, “Renegotiation, Learning and Relational Contracting”, March 2006. 2005-15 Randall Morck, “How to Eliminate Pyramidal Business Groups -The Double Taxation of

WP-7

Inter-corporate Dividends and other Incisive Uses of Tax Policy-”, March 2006. 2005-16 Joseph P.H. Fan, T.J. Wong and Tianyu Zhang, “The Emergence of Corporate Pyramids in

China”, March 2006. 2005-17 Yan Du, Qianqiu Liu and S. Ghon Rhee, “An Anatomy of the Magnet Effect: Evidence

from the Korea Stock Exchange High-Frequency Data”, March 2006. 2005-18 Kentaro Iwatsubo and Junko Shimizu, “Signaling Effects of Foreign Exchange Interventions

and Expectation Heterogeneity among Traders”, March 2006. 2005-19 Kentaro Iwatsubo, “Current Account Adjustment and Exchange Rate Pass-Through(in

Japanese)”, March 2006. 2005-20 Piruna Polsiri and Yupana Wiwattanakantang, “Corporate Governance of Banks in

Thailand”, March 2006. 2006-1 Hiroyuki Okamuro and Jian Xiong Zhang, “Ownership Structure and R&D Investment of

Japanese Start-up Firms,” June 2006. 2006-2 Hiroyuki Okamuro, “Determinants of R&D Activities by Start-up Firms: Evidence from

Japan,” June 2006. 2006-3 Joseph P.H. Fan, T.J. Wong and Tianyu Zhang, “The Emergence of Corporate Pyramids in

China,” August 2006. 2006-4 Pramuan Bunkanwanicha, Jyoti Gupta and Yupana Wiwattanakantang, “Pyramiding of

Family-owned Banks in Emerging Markets,” September 2006. 2006-5 Bernardo Bortolotti and Mara Faccio, “Reluctant privatization,” September 2006. 2006-6 Jörn Kleinert and Farid Toubal, “Distance costs and Multinationals’ foreign activities”,

October 2006. 2006-7 Jörn Kleinert and Farid Toubal, “Dissecting FDI”, October 2006. 2006-8 Shin-ichi Fukuda and Satoshi Koibuchi, “The Impacts of “Shock Therapy” on Large and

Small Clients: Experiences from Two Large Bank Failures in Japan”, October 2006. 2006-9 Shin-ichi Fukuda, Munehisa Kasuya and Kentaro Akashi, “The Role of Trade Credit for

Small Firms: An Implication from Japan’s Banking Crisis”, October 2006. 2006-10 Pramuan Bunkanwanicha and Yupana Wiwattanakantang, “Big Business Owners and

Politics: Investigating the Economic Incentives of Holding Top Office”, October 2006. 2006-11 Sang Whi Lee, Seung-Woog(Austin) Kwang, Donald J. Mullineaux and Kwangwoo Park,

“Agency Conflicts, Financial Distress, and Syndicate Structure: Evidence from Japanese Borrowers”, October 2006.

2006-12 Masaharu Hanazaki and Qun Liu, “Corporate Governance and Investment in East Asian

Firms -Empirical Analysis of Family-Controlled Firms”, October 2006. 2006-13 Kentaro Iwatsubo and Konomi Tonogi, “Foreign Ownership and Firm Value: Identification

through Heteroskedasticity (in Japanese)”, December 2006.

WP-8

2006-14 Kentaro Iwatsubo and Kazuyuki Inagaki, “Measuring Financial Market Contagion Using Dually-Traded Stocks of Asian Firms”, December 2006.

2006-15 Hun-Chang Lee, “When and how did Japan catch up with Korea? –A comparative study of

the pre-industrial economies of Korea and Japan”, February 2007. 2006-16 Kyoji Fukao, Keiko Ito, Shigesaburo Kabe, Deqiang Liu and Fumihide Takeuchi, “Are

Japanese Firms Failing to Catch up in Localization? An Empirical Analysis Based on Affiliate-level Data of Japanese Firms and a Case Study of the Automobile Industry in China”, February 2007.

2006-17 Kyoji Fukao, Young Gak Kim and Hyeog Ug Kwon, “Plant Turnover and TFP Dynamics in

Japanese Manufacturing”, February 2007. 2006-18 Kyoji Fukao, Keiko Ito, Hyeg Ug Kwon and Miho Takizawa, “Cross-Border Acquisitons

and Target Firms' Performance: Evidence from Japanese Firm-Level Data”, February 2007. 2006-19 Jordan Siegel and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “Expropriators or Turnaround Artists? The Role of

Controlling Families in South Korea (1985-2003)”, March 2007. 2006-20 Francis Kramarz and David Thesmar, “Social Networks in The Boardroom”, March 2007. 2006-21 Morten Bennedsen, Francisco Pérez-González and Daniel Wolfenzon, “Do CEOs matter?”,

March 2007. 2007-1 Ichiro Iwasaki, “Endogenous board formation and its determinants in a transition economy:

evidence from Russia*”, April 2007, Revised on October 2007. 2007-2 Joji Tokui, Tomohiko Inui, and Katsuaki Ochiai, “The Impact of Vintage Capital and R&D

on Japanese Firms’ Productivity”, April 2007. 2007-3 Yasuo Nakanishi and Tomohiko Inui, “Deregulation and Productivity in Japanese

Industries”, April 2007. 2007-4 Kyoji Fukao, “The Performance of Foreign Firms and the Macroeconomic Impact of FDI”,

May 2007. 2007-5 Taku Suzuki, “The Role of the State in Economic Growth of Post-Communist Transitional

Countries”, June 2007. 2007-6 Michiel van Leuvensteijn, Jacob A. Bikker, Adrian A.R.J.M. van Rixtel and Christoffer

Kok-Sørensen*, “A new approach to measuring competition in the loan markets of the euro area”, June 2007.

2007-7 Sea Jin Chang, Jaiho Chung, and Dean Xu, “FDI and Technology Spillovers in China”, July

2007. 2007-8 Fukunari Kimura, “The mechanics of production networks in Southeast Asia: the

fragmentation theory approach”, July 2007. 2007-9 Kyoji Fukao, Tsutomu Miyagawa, Miho Takizawa, “Productivity Growth and Resource

Reallocation in Japan”, November 2007. 2007-10 YoungGak Kim, “A Survey on Intangible Capital”, December 2007.

WP-9

2007-11 Sea-Jing Chang and Jay Hyuk Rhee, “Rapid International Expansion Strategy of Emerging Market Enterprises: The Interplay between Speed and Competitive Risks on International performance”, November 2007.

2007-12 Ishtiaq Mahmood, Will Mitchell, and Chi-Nien Chung, “The Structure of Intra-Group Ties:

Innovation in Taiwanese Business”, January 2008. 2007-13 Kyoji Fukao, Tomohiko Inui, Shigesaburo Kabe and Deqiang Liu, “ An International

Comparison of the TFP Levels of Japanese, Korean and Chinese Listed Firms“, March 2008.

2007-14 Pramuan Bunkanwanicha and Yupana Wiwattanakantang, “Allocating Risk Across

Pyramidal Tiers: Evidence from Thai Business Groups”, March 2008. 2008-1 Rüdiger Fahlenbrach and René M. Stulz, "Managerial Ownership Dynamics and Firm

Value", April 2008. 2008-2 Morten Bennedsen, Kasper Meisner Nielsen, and, Thomas Vester Nielsen, “Private

Contracting and Corporate Governance: Evidence from the Provision of Tag-Along Rights in an Emerging Market”, April 2008.

2008-3 Joseph P.H. Fan, Jun Huang, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Mengxin Zhao, “Corporate

Diversification in China: Causes and Consequences”, April 2008. 2008-4 Daniel Ferreira, Miguel A. Ferreira, Clara C. Raposo, “Board Structure and Price

Informativeness”, April 2008. 2008-5 Nicola Gennaioli and Stefano Rossi, “Judicial Discretion in Corporate Bankruptcy”, April

2008. 2008-6 Nicola Gennaioli and Stefano Rossi, “Optimal Resolutions of Financial Distress by

Contract”, April 2008. 2008-7 Renée B. Adams and Daniel Ferreira, “Women in the Boardroom and Their Impact on

Governance and Performance”, April 2008. 2008-8 Worawat Margsiri, Antonio S. Melloy, and Martin E. Ruckesz, “A Dynamic Analysis of

Growth via Acquisition”, April 2008. 2008-9 Pantisa Pavabutra and Sukanya Prangwattananon, “Tick Size Change on the Stock

Exchange of Thailand”, April 2008. 2008-10 Maria Boutchkova, Hitesh Doshi, Art Durnev, and Alexander Molchanov, “Politics and

Volatility”, April 2008. 2008-11 Yan-Leung Cheung, P. Raghavendra Rau, and Aris Stouraitis, “The Helping Hand, the Lazy

Hand, or the Grabbing Hand? Central vs. Local Government Shareholders in Publicly Listed Firms in China”, April 2008.

2008-12 Art Durnev and Larry Fauver, “Stealing from Thieves: Firm Governance and Performance

when States are Predatory”, April 2008. 2008-13 Kenneth Lehn, Sukesh Patro, and Mengxin Zhao, “Determinants of the Size and Structure of

Corporate Boards: 1935-2000”, April 2008.

WP-10

2008-14 Ishtiaq P. Mahmood, Hong-Jin Zhu and Edward J. Zajac, “Where Can Capabilities Come From? How the Content of Network Ties Affects Capability Acquisition”, April 2008.

2008-15 Vladimir I. Ivanov and Ronald W. Masulis, “Corporate Venture Capital, Strategic Alliances,

and the Governance of Newly Public Firms”, May 2008. 2008-16 Dick Beason, Ken Gordon, Vikas Mehrotra and Akiko Watanabe, “Does Restructuring Pay

in Japan? Evidence Following the Lost Decade”, July 2008 (revision uploaded on Oct. 2009).

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