Outsourcing Active Ownership in Japan

Outsourcing Active Ownership in Japan

Marco Becht, Julian Franks, Hideaki Miyajima, Kazunori (Icko) Suzuki

Series number :

Serial Number: 
766/2021

Date posted :

June 11 2021

Last revised :

June 11 2021
SSRN Share

Keywords

  • Corporate governance • 
  • active ownership • 
  • Investor Stewardship • 
  • Private Engagement • 
  • Hedge Fund Activism • 
  • corporate governance code

This paper examines active ownership in Japan by an equity ownership service, Governance for Owners Japan (GOJ). GOJ engages with portfolio companies on behalf of Japanese and international institutional investors. The engagements are exclusively private and are not observable to the public.

We use the stated objectives of the interventions to measure the incidence of success, and the stock market response to the public announcement of engagement outcomes. We find a high rate of success and average cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) of about 2.6 percent between -5 and +5 of an event date in response to outcome announcements. Since there is more than one outcome per engagement, the average CARs per engagement is 6.5 percent. Target companies were more likely to adopt recommendations proposed in GOJ’s private engagements than in a sample of public activist engagements over a similar time period.

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Authors

Professor
Real name:
Marco Becht
Fellow, Research Member, Board Member
Solvay Brussels School for Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles
Prof.
Real name:
Hideaki Miyajima
Waseda University