기업소유권은 정말 중요한가? 일본 기업지배구조에서 외국인 투자가의 역할

After the banking crisis of 1997, corporate ownership in Japan shiftedfrom an insider-dominated to an outsider-dominated structure. This paperanalyzes the impact of dramatic changes in the ownership structure oncorporate governance and firm value, focusing on the role of foreigninstitutional investors. There are two competing views on the role ofincreased foreign ownership. The positive view is that foreign investorshave had high monitoring capabilities and have encouraged improvementsin the governance arrangement of firms resulting in higher performance. Conversely, the negative view is that they have had strong bias in theirinvestment strategies, and were less committed to a particular firm. Eventhough a correlation between foreign ownership and high performance hasbeen observed, it may be a superficial relationship. Higher stock returnscan be induced by demands for stocks, while performance can simplyreflect a foreign investor’s preference for a high quality firm. To determinewhich view is more compelling, we constructed a unique long-term dataset, and examined the determinants of foreign ownership and its impacton stock returns as well as performance. We found that the investmentbehavior of foreign investors has been characterized by a particular bias,and takes into account governance arrangements. Second, their investmentsubstantially affected the stock returns of firms. Third, even after controlling for reverse causality, their growing presence positively affectedfirm performance, suggesting that foreign institutional investors played adisciplinary role after their shareholding increased.