Outsourcing Active Ownership in Japan

This paper examines active ownership in Japan by an equity service, Governance for Owners (GOJ). GOJ engages with portfolio companies on behalf of Japanese and international institutional investors. The engagements are exclusively private not observable to the public. We use stated objectives interventions measure incidence success, stock market response public announcement engagement outcomes. find a high rate success average cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) about 2.6 percent between -5 +5 event date outcome announcements. Since there is more than one per engagement, CARs 6.5 percent. Target were likely adopt recommendations proposed GOJ’s sample activist over similar time period.