Empirical Examinations of the Significance of Equity Ownership Structure in Japanese Corporate Groups

这项研究有两个主要目的。首先，本研究从内部资本市场的角度考察了日本企业集团内的上市子公司，构建了2004-2005年间上市母子公司的详细数据库。其次，本研究还考察了可能在日本企业集团重组中扮演非常重要角色的私有化交易等收购交易的经济影响。对于第一个目标，本研究发现，对于日本企业集团而言，多元化程度与上市子公司的业绩并不相关，这意味着内部资本市场不能很好地发挥作用。然而，仔细研究发现，对于拥有低风险项目的子公司来说，企业集团的业务多样性提高了子公司的业绩。因此，内部资本市场的功能只对拥有高风险项目的子公司起作用。我们将这些结果解释为，对于从事高风险、高增长项目的子公司，由于母公司施加了太多的控制权，可能存在对子公司经理的激励问题。对于第二个目标，本研究对涉及专门为收购而发起的投资基金的收购交易进行了标准事件研究。我们发现，股票价格对收购公告的反应平均是积极的，并且在统计上具有显著意义。我们的检验进一步表明，对收购公告的正向股价反应的来源是杠杆增加交易(即杠杆收购)的税收效应和目标公司的反向低估。

This research has two main objectives. First, this research examines listed subsidiary companies within Japanese corporate groups from a perspective of the internal capital market by building the detailed database about listed parent and subsidiary companies for the period from 2004 to 2005. Second, this research also examines economic impacts of buyout transactions such as going-private transactions that may play a very important role in restructuring Japanese corporate groups.For the first objective, this research finds that for Japanese corporate groups the degree of diversity is not associated with performance of listed subsidiaries, which implies that the internal capital market does not function well. However, a close examination reveals that for subsidiaries with low-risk projects the business diversity of the corporate group enhances the performance of subsidiary companies. Thus, the function of the internal capital market only breaks down for subsidiary companies with high-risk projects. We interpret these results as indicating that for the subsidiaries engaging in high-risk, high-growth projects, there may be an incentive issue for the managers of the subsidiary companies due to too much control exerted by their parent companies.For the second objective, this research conducts standard event study about the buyout transactions that involve investment funds specifically launched for buyouts. We find that the stock price reactions to the buyout announcements are on average positive and statistically significant. Our examinations further reveal that sources of the positive stock price reactions to the buyout announcements are the tax effect of leverage-increasing transactions (i.e., LBO)and the reversed undervaluation of target companies.