This study aimed to reveal the role of institutional investors with shareholder-oriented scopes in a stakeholder-oriented economy such as Japan. With financial globalization, the increasing number of institutional shareholders in Japanese corporations enables us to investigate whether their shareholder-oriented perspectives are conducive to taking on effective monitoring roles under stakeholder-oriented corporate governance. This study’s sample included large listed firms of the TOPIX 500 in Japan during 2010-2016. Using 2924 firm-year observations, the effect of institutional investors on firm performance was analyzed to test the role of institutional investors in stakeholder-oriented corporate governance. Our study showed that the monitoring role of institutional shareholders, or foreign shareholders, functions effectively in Japanese corporations. In addition, we showed that the monitoring roles of these are expected to strengthen firms through higher growth opportunities. These results implied that institutional shareholders contribute to enhancing sustainable firm performance and constructing sustainable corporate governance mechanisms in a stakeholder-oriented system.

Agency theory predicts that institutional ownership plays an important role in monitoring corporate risk-taking. This study examines this ownership-risk taking linkage in Japan over the period 2007 and 2019. We proxy risk through measures of idiosyncratic risk, total risk, and market beta. We show that (relational) foreign institutional shareholdings (do not) induce corporate risk-taking, thereby mitigating (preserving) the managerial ‘quiet life’ in Japanese corporations. Using 2SLS analysis, the roles of institutional shareholders are robust to endogeneity concerns. Finally, we also confirm robustness using alternative accounting-based risk proxies such as the standard deviation of Tobin’s Q and ROA. Our study implies that the monitoring of institutional shareholders is important in Japanese corporations whose top executives might be prone to seek a ‘quiet life’.

Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) are unique economic and governance events as privately held firms issue common stock or shares to the public for the first time. The governance issues surrounding IPOs are relatively unexamined compared to more established, and usually larger, firms. As such, they provide a unique context to study corporate governance and its development around the world. Based on a collaborative international research project, this book analyses the corporate governance of IPOs in twenty-one countries, each of which is characterized by different governance environments and different levels of IPO activity. The end result is a broad and deep assessment of governance practices and IPO activity for an array of economies that represent roughly 80 percent of the global economy. These chapters collectively provide new insights into what a global theory of corporate governance might look like and offer guidance to policy makers and academics regarding national governance configurations.