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Title
Japanese:日本におけるアクティビスト介入の二重予測因子としてのガバナンス構造と財務脆弱性 
English:Predicted, Not Provoked: Governance Structure and Financial Vulnerability as Dual Predictors of Activist Intervention in Japan 
Author
Japanese: 小間井俊輔.  
English: Shunsuke Komai.  
Language English 
Journal/Book name
Japanese: 
English: 
Volume, Number, Page        
Published date May 23, 2026 
Publisher
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English: 
Official URL https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6818658
 
DOI https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6818658
Abstract We demonstrate that activist shareholder intervention in Japan is structurally predictable from publicly available governance and financial data years before it occurs. Using the ACTS (Activist Candidate Target Score) model applied to 3,566 Tokyo Stock Exchange listed companies, we show that firms subsequently targeted by activist investors score significantly higher on governance and financial vulnerability measures three years before intervention (mean difference: +3.31 points, p<0.001), with the gap widening monotonically to +9.07 points at the time of intervention. Firms in the highest vulnerability quartile experience intervention at 51.36 times the rate of firms in the lowest quartile. A key empirical finding is that governance structure variables—institutional ownership ratio and shareholder cross-holding ratio—dominate financial variables in predictive power: the governance axis alone achieves AUC=0.813, while the financial axis alone achieves AUC=0.681, and the combined model achieves AUC=0.847. The dominant early-warning signals are structural ownership characteristics entirely independent of corporate controversy. Three lines of evidence reject the scandal hypothesis: the pre-intervention score divergence predates any corporate event; the earliest predictive signals are governance structural variables, not event-driven; and the activists themselves explicitly deny the scandal thesis in primary-source interviews. These findings establish that activist intervention is the visible endpoint of a multi-year process rooted in governance structure and financial vulnerability, not an unpredictable external shock to corporate governance.

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