Researchers at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School have asked the interesting question:

Has hedge fund activism done in Japan what hedge fund activism seems to have done in the US: driven enduring change in US corporate governance (management effectiveness/ managerial decisions/ labour management) as well as in market perception?

Surprisingly, analysis of financial data by J. Buchanan, D. Chai and S. Deakin, shows *no* enduring changes in the three areas of corporate governance at all … and, moreover, that market perception was consistently UNfavourable – the *opposite* of what has happened in the USA.

They conclude that the same pressures don’t produce the same results in different markets: “country-level differences in corporate governance identified in the varieties of capitalism literature are robust, at least in the short term”.

All that is in the Judge Business School’s Working Paper 494 titled “UNEXPECTED CORPORATE OUTCOMES FROM HEDGE FUND ACTIVISM IN JAPAN” out a few days ago this month, and available on the website https://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/home