The following post comes to us from Julian Franks, Professor of Finance at London Business School; Colin Mayer, Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; and Hideaki Miyajima, Professor of Commerce at Waseda University.
The Japanese insider ownership system began to fall apart approximately twenty years after it came into operation at the beginning of the 1970s. In our paper, The Ownership of Japanese Corporations in the 20th Century, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we suggest that the insider system emerged in the first place because the alternative institutions for promoting outside ownership failed. The problem was not with the legal framework, which was relatively strong in Japan. Instead, the failure was due to the absence of institutional reputational capital in equity markets equivalent to that embedded in the business coordinators and zaibatsu earlier in the century. The first point that this brings out is that the destruction of institutions, such as zaibatsu, can be serious in terms of economic performance. The second point is that the creation of new institutions of trust to replace previous institutions is complex and not readily achieved by design.