Research Activities

JSRI’s seminars are attended by many researchers from universities and other research institutions as well as professionals working in financial and capital markets who use the seminars as avenue for a lively discussion.
JSRI also invites external researchers studying financial and capital markets to collaborate with and support JSRI’s research activities as visiting researchers.

JSRI serves as secretariat for the Society for the Economic Studies of Securities (SESS), a society of researchers focused on the theory, history, and policy of securities. In this role, JSRI actively supports SESS’s activities.

JSRI engages in a variety of efforts to cultivate and partner with young researchers, including inviting them to participate in seminars, providing a venue for lectures and presentations, and engaging them as visiting researchers.

JSRI issues a variety of publications compiling the results of its research activities.
JSRI’s “IllustratedGuide to Securities Markets” Series provides overviews of securities markets in Japan, the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Another multi-volume series, “Historical Materials on the Securities Market in Japan” is currently in progress, with Pre-War and Post-War volumes already published and a second Post-War volume forthcoming that will cover the period from the late 1960s to the bubble economy. JSRI also occasionally issues stand-alone publications summarizing the results of its research seminars.

【Securities Market in Japan】
We publish a Japanese-language book called “Securities Market in Japan: An Illustrated Guide” that explains the structure, function, and current state of the Japanese securities market in an easy-to-understand way, as well as an English translation of this book called “Securities Market in Japan” every two years.
This book is an English translation of the 2024 edition of “Securities Market in Japan: An Illustrated Guide” and is designed to be useful for a wide range of people who are interested in the Japanese securities market.

We, the Japan Securities Research Institute publishes “The JSRI Journal of Financial and Securities Markets,” on a regular basis.
This academic journal is published four times a year and publishes papers mainly analyze Japanese capital markets.
All academic papers can be downloaded for free in Japanese from the address below.

• https://www.jsri.or.jp/publication/periodical/economics/

English summaries are available starting from Vol.125.


Vol.127 includes the following six academic papers.


This paper aims to examine the Collective Defined-Contribution Plan (CDC) as a guideline for corporate pension reform in Japan and to clarify the implications that can be derived from it. The two main reforms are (1) the abolition of defined-benefit company pensions and their integration into defined-contribution pensions and (2) collective investment by integrating defined-contribution pensions. This paper examines these two reforms.


This paper analyses the SEC’s regulatory approach to new technologies that perform predictive data analytics, including AI, by discussing the Proposed Rule published by the SEC in July 2023. The Proposed Rule seeks to manage conflicts of interest that may arise from the use of new technologies by broker-dealers and investment advisers. The Proposed Rule is a different regulatory approach than the traditional disclosure-based management of conflicts of interest and expands the definition of conflict of interest itself. Furthermore, the rule’s fairly broad definition of new technologies (Covered Technology), including AI, increases the cost of implementing the rule and may prevent the use of new technologies, particularly for smaller firms. The final part of this paper identifies the implications and challenges of the SEC’s regulatory approach to new technologies and considers the issues that the SEC needs to address in preparation for final rulemaking.


This paper seeks to identify causal relationships between the performance of listed subsidiaries since the 2000s, assuming that the status of subsidiary listing may be an endogenous variable. The results of the analysis show from the pooled and panel analyses that the listed subsidiary dummy is significantly positive for ROA in both periods. This means that the financial performance of listed subsidiaries is good, a result that is consistent with previous studies. On the other hand, the coefficient of the listed subsidiary dummy was not significant for either financial or stock price performance in the system GMM estimation considering that the explanatory variables including listed subsidiaries are endogenous variables.


This paper reports on the effects of governance reform in Japan. After the introduction of the Stewardship Code and the Corporate Governance Code, Japanese institutional investors were required to fulfil their fiduciary responsibility and operational efficiency, and at the same time they were expected to monitor companies. The purpose of this paper is to show the effects of governance reform in Japan by analyzing the relationship between shareholder and employee interests and institutional investors before and after the introduction of these two codes.


This paper provides an overview of the concept of financial well-being in the United States, its historical development and current status, and reports on the support measures provided by financial educators, financial advisers and others. In the US, the CFPB defined financial wellbeing in 2015 and has been conducting research and initiatives to make it a reality. Financial well-being research initially began as a new goal for financial education, but as the elements to reach this goal have become clearer, it has also brought different The US case is a good example of this. Following the example of the US, support for changing financial behavior is needed in Japan to help people reach financial well-being, and financial education and investment advice will become more connected.


As one interest rate indicator for the post-LIBOR era, there has been debate in the US over the Credit Sensitive Rate (CSR). While there have been voices in favor of CSRs, particularly in the banking industry, the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) has recognized that some CSRs do not comply with the IOSCO Principles on Interest Rate Indicators because they are flawed in the same way as LIBOR. The IOSCO Principles are not legally binding norms (soft law) but are de facto binding in international financial markets and have a significant impact on the choices of market participants. The democratic legitimacy of soft law by international organizations in international financial markets has been discussed in the past, but this paper examines the legitimacy of IOSCO’s current response from the new perspective of interest rate index reform. It concludes that, first, legitimacy is questionable from the perspective of procedures and processes, specifically in terms of consultations with stakeholders and consistency with individual national laws. Secondly, from the perspective of effectiveness, specifically in terms of the ambiguity of the decision-making criteria, disobedience to the principles set out in the IOSCO Principles, and consideration of the differences in the nature of each interest rate indicator, it is difficult to assess that it is based on sufficient legitimacy.



Vol.126 includes the following six academic papers.


In Japan, an exposure draft of the Sustainability Information Disclosure Standard by the Sustainability Standards Board was published on 29 March. This paper introduces and discusses the exposure draft of the Working Group on Sustainability Information Disclosure and Assurance.


Assuming investors have warm-growth or externality utility for ESG scores and firms choose a combination of monetary profit and ESG scores, the paper examines what ESG score level is chosen in equilibrium.


The GPIF (Government Pension Investment Fund) invests in equities based on ‘ESG indices’. Such investments are supposed to improve the risk-adjusted returns of the GPIF’s portfolio over the long term. The ‘alpha effect’ results from the return of the ESG investment portfolio exceeding the return of the overall market. Additionally, the ‘beta effect’ results from improving the overall market returns through ESG investments. This paper argues that the ‘alpha effect’ of current ESG index-based investments is likely to be negative.


The presence of female directors is also increasing in initial public offerings. This paper empirically examines the effect of the presence of female directors on the level of underpricing of the IPO price. The empirical analysis showed that the ratio of female directors to all directors and the dummy variable indicating the presence of female directors had a negative and significant effect.


Appropriate ESG responses are a global movement, with all countries and all industries showing a high level of interest. There is no dearth of studies examining how the global banking industry is addressing ESG compared to other industries. The relevant studies are diverse and numerous. However, the number is very small if one focuses exclusively on studies that examine whether banks perform better depending on the extent of ESG disclosures and what incentives banks have to disclose. Of these, the main theme of this paper is whether disclosure pays off.


This paper describes more than ten characteristics of intangible assets and intangible debts, including their proprietary nature. It analyzes their economic consequences and shows that there are both favorable and undesirable aspects of intangible assets and debts, respectively, which coexist and are empirically unknown.



Vol.125 includes the following four academic papers.


This paper analyses count data for subsidiaries by country in Europe with the aim of understanding the effects of taxation on the location of Japanese multinationals in recent years by industry sector.


Regarding the impact of intra-company remuneration disparities on company performance, both positive and negative impacts have been reported for overseas companies, and it is an empirical question as to which impact is more dominant. In addition, as the labor market situation differs from country to country, it is not known whether the results of studies targeting overseas firms are applicable to Japanese firms.
This paper investigates the relationship between the remuneration gap between directors and employees and corporate performance in Japanese firms, breaking it down into the part explained by economic factors and the part not explained by economic factors.


The scale of equity options trading in the US has increased over the past few years. This is due to the popularity of meme stocks, no brokerage fees and active trading in the stock market. Under these circumstances, a trading practice known as payment for order flow (PFOF), in which retail brokers receive a rebate when they forward orders to other brokers (wholesalers, etc.) for execution of investors’ orders, has been attracting attention. This paper focuses on the zero-commission practice of retail brokers waiving brokerage commissions for customers as a factor in the expansion of the stock options market, and examines the possibility that market conditions, such as investor behavior, have changed as a result of the expansion of this practice.


This study analyses the determinants of the takeover premium and the fairness of the terms of the transaction in a wholly-owned subsidiary conversion, focusing on the information asymmetry between the parent company and the ordinary shareholders of the subsidiary and the bargaining power of the parent company in a wholly-owned subsidiary conversion to dissolve the parent-subsidiary listing.