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Disaggregating the group effect: Vertical and horizontal keiretsu in changing economic times

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Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of keiretsu group affiliation among members of horizontal and vertical keiretsu in Japan over two time periods: 1992–1997, and 1997–2002. We found that ties were more stable in the later time period and therefore restricted our empirical analysis to the 1992–1997 period. We also found differences in the response of vertically and horizontally linked groups to economic downturn and capital market change—vertically linked groups weakened their ties while horizontally linked groups showed more stability.

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Notes

  1. Bank mergers in 2000 and 2001 led to a consolidation into four keiretsu.

  2. This is an imperfect solution but in untabulated results we re-estimated our results excluding various groups (such as Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Toyota). The results we present are robust to these alternative specifications of the sample. Results are available upon request from the authors.

  3. Stata software was used for model estimation. In Stata there is a choice to present coefficients either in the form of “b” or “exponent b,” the latter usually called “relative-risk ratios.” We elected to present results as “relative-risk ratios.”

  4. There was only one firm in SIC 7 among decreasing horizontal firms and only one among increasing horizontal firms, while there were no firms in the decreasing vertical category. Our sample included no firms from SIC 8. As explained earlier, we excluded firms within the financial sector as well as regulated firms. Thus when we performed the multinomial regression to avoid problems with collinearity we suppressed firms within the SIC 5 category.

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Correspondence to Sandra Dow.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 5 Descriptive statistics: Means and standard deviations.

Appendix 2

Table 6 Correlation matrix (number of observations = 94).

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Dow, S., McGuire, J. & Yoshikawa, T. Disaggregating the group effect: Vertical and horizontal keiretsu in changing economic times. Asia Pac J Manag 28, 299–323 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-009-9160-5

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