ISSN 1045-6333 THE FABLE OF THE KEIRETSU Yoshiro Miwa J. Mark Ramseyer Discussion Paper No. 316 3/2001 Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA 02138 The Center for Law, Economics, and Business is supported by a grant from the John M. Olin Foundation. This paper can be downloaded without charge from: The Harvard John M. Olin Discussion Paper Series: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/ JEL: G3, K2, L1, P5 Address correspondence to: University of Tokyo Faculty of Economics 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo FAX: 03-5841-5521
[email protected] [email protected] The Fable of the Keiretsu by Yoshiro Miwa & J. Mark Ramseyer* Abstract: Central to so many accounts of post-war Japan, the keiretsu corporate groups have never had economic substance. Conceived by Marxists committed to locating "domination" by "monopoly capital," they found an early audience among western scholars searching for evidence of culture-specific group behavior in Japan. By the 1990s, they had moved into mainstream economic studies, and keiretsu dummies appeared in virtually all econometric regressions of Japanese industrial or corporate structure. Yet the keiretsu began as a figment of the academic imagination, and they remain that today. The most commonly used keiretsu roster first groups large financial institutions by their pre-war antecedents. It then assigns firms to a group if the sum of its loans from those institutions exceeds the amount it borrows from the next largest lender. Other rosters start by asking whether firm presidents meet occasionally with other presidents for lunch. Regardless of the definition used, cross-shareholdings were trivial even during the years when keiretsu ties were supposedly strongest, and membership has only badly proxied for "main bank" ties.