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Japan has always been an “odd man out” from the standpoint of Western norm or Western finance. It is a country that is as developed as any in the West. However, it is also a country that possesses the significant institutional and cultural traits that separate it from the West. An important question in finance is to what extent the basic models of finance, developed with the Western “perfect market” view in mind, can be applied to Japan; or conversely, what critical adjustments must be made to make models amenable to the reality of Japanese finance.

This paper examines the exchange risk sensitivity of Japanese firms, and the exchange risk pricing in the Japanese stock market for the period of 1975–2001. We find that an appreciation of the yen is positively associated with industry portfolio returns. This supports the dominance of wealth effects over cash flow effects. This is in contrast to U.S. studies that report a weak, negative relationship between stocks and the domestic currency. The results are more pronounced in the pre-Crash period, and vary somewhat depending on the exchange risk measures used. Similarly, the exchange risk is priced in the pre-Crash period, but not in the post-Crash period. These results suggest that the exchange rate elasticity of the Japanese economy has declined in the post-bubble period of economic stagnation.

The increased market share of foreign investment trusts in Japan may be attributed to the fact that Japanese managers have dramatically underperformed benchmarks. Recently, we showed that this underperformance can be attributed to a unique Japanese tax environment. Using data from 1998 though 2001, we find that Japanese and foreign managers are becoming very similar in style and performance. However, Japanese managers suffered in the immediate aftermath of a major April 2000 revision in the tax code. We attribute this result to the huge inflow of new money into this sector and the style shifts necessary to accommodate this flow.

This paper investigates Japanese stock returns for the Friday, Monday and Tuesday surrounding U.S. Monday holiday closures. The empirical results show that U.S. Monday closures have a statistically significant impact on Japanese stock return dynamics for surrounding trading days, but do not support the hypothesis that the U.S. Monday and Japanese Tuesday effects are related. Potential explanations for the occurrence and then disappearance of the Japanese Tuesday effect rely on market microstructure properties unique to the Tokyo market. The spillover effects from New York to Tokyo have been increased in density over time, which is attributed to market structural changes represented by the introduction of Nikkei 225 index futures on the SIMEX in 1986.

The anomalous patterns in foreign exchange markets have received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper empirically investigates the Day-of-the-Week effect in the yen-dollar currency market for three decades and confirms that such effect did exist for the period 1973–1989, but it disappears for the 1990s. The results remain unchanged when the business condition effect, the January effect, the holiday effect, and the first and last day of the month effect are controlled. The results suggest that financial deregulation in Japan has made foreign currency markets more efficient in recent years.

I will investigate the short-term and the long-term characteristics of Japanese daily overnight call rate between 1985 and 1999 and compare it with the U.S. federal funds rate during the same period. Such long-term data for the former has not been utilized in the previous studies. When we compare the short-term characteristics of these two rates with the corresponding long-term ones, those are found to be different. When we compare these two rates in the short-term as well as in the long-term, the long-term characteristics are found to be different, even though the short-term characteristics are similar in some sub-sample periods.

We empirically investigate the extent to which index options markets anticipated the sharp decline in stock prices in early 1990 in Japan. A skewness index (Bates, 1991) measuring the extent to which out-of-the-money puts are priced relative to calls is estimated.

Many researchers suggest that investment bankers underprice IPOs. However, from 1989 to 1996, all Japanese IPOs were auctioned, reducing the role of underwriters. Initial returns of Japanese price-competitive IPOs are not found lower than underwriter-priced U.S. IPOs. Issue size, firm size, general market movements, insider sales levels, and underwriter quality are not highly related to initial returns under price-competitive auctions. However, there appears to be a strong partial adjustment phenomenon. Thus, price-competitive auctions did not result in significantly lower initial returns, but did reduce the impacts of many traditional variables found to significantly affect initial returns in U.S. underwriter-priced IPOs.