著者

嶋野 智仁

出版者

経済理論学会

雑誌

季刊経済理論 (ISSN:18825184)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.51, no.4, pp.70-82, 2015-01-20 (Released:2017-04-25)

被引用文献数

1

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The aim of this paper is to examine how financialization affects capital accumulation in Japan from the viewpoint of the spread of shareholder value orientation in Japanese firms. After bubble economy collapse in the beginning of the 1990s, new ideology for corporate governance-"shareholder value orientation"-began to emerge in Japanese firms. The diffusion of shareholder value orientation in firms is one of the most important characteristics of financialization, and there are many empirical studies on the relationship between the change of firms' behavior evoked by this ideology and capital accumulation in US economies. As for Japanese economies, however, there have been no empirical studies on the effect of financialization on capital accumulation from the viewpoint of the spread of shareholder value orientation. In this paper, I make an empirical analysis on how financialization affect capital accumulation in Japan by estimating investment functions which include the proxy variable of the strength of shareholder value orientation in independent variables. As subjects of my empirical research, I choose Japanese non-financial corporation sectors. I also divide these subjects into several industries (manufacturing firms and non manufacturing firms) and several firm sizes(big firms and small-medium firms). And I select dividend payout-capital stock ratio for the proxy variable of Japanese financialization in the investment function because this variable dramatically increase in all categories of subjects of empirical research after 2000s reflecting the diffusion of shareholder orientation in Japanese firms. Theoretically, this significant increase of dividend payout-capital stock ratio may depress capital accumulation because increasing dividend payout reduce internal funds for investment and change firms'management goals from investment for longterm growth to short-term profit for sustaining dividend and stock price. To ascertain this theoretical possibility, I estimate investment function and find interesting results. Dividend payout-capital stock ratio is estimated negatively and statistically significant in the investment function both in the manufacturing and non manufacturing big firms, but is not estimated significantly in the small-medium firms both in the two industries. This means the negative effect of shareholder value orientation on capital accumulation is important for Japanese big firms, but not for Japanese small-medium firms. These results suggest that the spread of shareholder value orientation in Japanese firms decrease capital accumulation especially in big firms after 2000s. This is the effect of financialization on capital accumulation in Japan.