On January 25th, Professor Yishay Yafeh, who is the Dean of the School of Business Administration, in the Hebrew University and an economist specializing in corporate governance, gave a lecture for students and faculty members at Waseda University. This workshop was supported by the Top Global University Project Center for Empirical Analysis of Political Economy, under the joint auspices of the Research Institute of Business Administration, Waseda University (RIBA) and the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS). The moderator was Hideaki Miyajima, Director of Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS) and Professor at the Graduate School of Commerce.
In the workshop, Professor Yafeh presented research entitled “The Great Pyramids of America: A Revised History of US Business Groups, Corporate Ownership and Regulation, 1930-1950” coauthored with Eugene Kandel from Hebrew University, Konstantin Kosenko from Bank of Israel and Randall Morck from University of Alberta entitled. This study examines how the present corporate ownership structure in United States emerged using a new, extensive and hand-collected firm-level data. Until the mid-1930s, United States corporate ownership was not different from other countries. Over 50 pyramidal business groups controlled firms in manufacturing, railroad and public utilities. However, in the late 1930s and 1940s, these pyramidal business groups began to be downsized and eventually disappeared. The main cause of their disappearance of pyramidal business groups was main topic of his presentation which emphasizes that several regulatory measures had an incentive to reform corporate ownership. Thus, large listed firms in the United States today are exceptional in the sense that firms are freestanding: that is they neither control nor are controlled by another firms.
During the workshop, Professor Yafeh and Waseda University Faculty (Hideaki Miyajima and Shinichi Hirota, Professors at the Graduate School of Commerce, and Nobuhiko Hibara, Associate Professor at Waseda Business School) had a lively exchange of views about research results, while students took notes eagerly. The classroom had a lively mood. In addition to this workshop, Professor Yafeh conducted four sessions of special lecture as well as three individual guidance for graduate students. Even after the individual guidance, Professor Yafeh eagerly gave students guidance and the session and guidances were very substantial.
