This paper focuses on the widespread inter-corporate shareholdings in Japan and their recent changes. This paper is first to use a comprehensive database of corporate shareholdings to study the sales of existing shareholdings.
Our results show that a sale of shareholdings occurred mainly because of a seller's financial difficulties and the seller chose its target to be a company with little business relationship.
We find that the share price of a seller reacts more negatively to the news of
a sale than that of a target firm, but the latter shows negative abnormal
performances over one year after the news.
(c) 2000-2002 Kazunori Suzuki