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This text contains the latest edition of this book. It covers the basis of the Japanese legal system, the civil code, business related laws, and other laws including criminal law and procedure, and foreign relations law. Since the last edition, Japanese law has undergone major reform all of which is reflected in the new text. In particular, the new edition covers the new company law and the Financial Products Trading Law, both of which have been completely overhauled. After the ‘lost decade’ following the collapse of the ‘bubble economy’ in 1990, Japan has gone through a major reform — deregulation or ‘regulatory reform’. Accordingly, major changes took place in almost every area of law. There was a large-scale ‘Justice System Reform’ which encompassed various changes in the court system, the introduction of lay assessors in the criminal procedure, a new law school system, etc. Company law, which was embodied in the Commercial Code, was completely overhauled under a different concept and became a separate law — the Company Law of 2005. Securities and Exchange Law was replaced by the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law in 2006. Even the Civil Code, which had remained more or less unchanged (except for family and succession) since the late 19th century, has gone through significant changes. Certainly there are many positive results coming out of these reforms, but also there have been some doubtful changes. Thee outcome of the reforms of the past decade is yet to be assessed. These changes and their impact are covered in this book.

In liquid helium, an electron is surrounded by a cavity called an electron bubble of 20 Ångstroms in diameter. A positive helium ion is solvated by an electrostriction induced solid helium-ice shell called a snowball of 7 Ångstroms in diameter. By studying their transport properties, these objects are well suited for the testing of the microscopic properties of superfluidity. At low temperatures and with small electric fields, the drift velocity of the charges depends on their interaction with the elementary excitations of the superfluid: phonons, rotons, and ³He atomic impurities. At higher fields, ions produce quantized vortex rings and vortex lines and studying these sheds light on quantum hydrodynamics. In the fermionic liquid, the ³He isotope ion transport properties display important pieces of information on the coupling of a charge to a Fermi liquid and on the richer topological structure of the superfluid phases appearing at ultralow temperatures. In the normal liquid phases of both isotopes, ions and electrons are used to probe classical hydrodynamics at the λ-transition and at the liquid-vapor transition at which long-range critical fluctuations of the appropriate order parameter occur. Several experiments have investigated the structure of electron bubbles. Electron drift velocity measurements in dense helium gas have elucidated the dynamics of electron bubble formation. This book provides a review of the more than forty-year-long experimental and theoretical research on the transport properties of electrons and ions in liquid and gaseous helium.

This book examines the effective governance, monitoring, and control of corporations and financial markets, drawing on the lessons of history and with a firm focus on the future. The book is divided into four parts. Part I consists of two chapters: the first considers the nature, effects, and consequences of the bubble of 1995-2000; the second chapter assesses the more fundamental effects related to the evolving dominance of capital markets, which has changed the way corporate executives perceive their role and the expectations they are required to meet. Part II consists of three chapters that explore the internal governance function of corporations. Part III includes three chapters that examine the modern roles and practices of institutional investors, auditors, and banks and brokerages in conducting the fiduciary and governance functions allocated to them in the capital-market system. Part IV examines the evolution of the legal and regulatory system supporting the markets, and focuses on its troubling impotence as a consequence of modern political realities. It analyzes how conflicts of interest have become a more serious threat to the well-being of the market system than before.

This book aims at parsing and explaining some key forces that feature in every one of the global and regional financial crises and monetary crises that erupted in the world economy over the past decades. The text presents historical accounts of the recent major financial crises and then proceeds to present and explain the main streams of theories on the financial crises that featured in these historical episodes: banking crises and panics; credit frictions and market freezes; currency regime crises, births and bursts of asset bubbles, and conflicting forces behind the volatility of international capital flows. The book also deals with the emergence of a new paradigm: the development of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century macroeconomic analytical framework from the pre-2008 paradigm of modern macroeconomic thinking that served as the workhorse of policy making. The old model had been used to provide the theoretical underpinning for monetary and fiscal policy making in the period known as the Great Moderation. But, as part of the intellectual awakening after the 2008 global crisis, there is a surge of remodeling efforts aimed at the development of an analytical framework that can underpin monetary and fiscal policy making in the era of the Great Recession.

This book relays a compelling narrative of the U.S. economy's struggle to emerge from the Great Recession of 2008. It explains the causes and impact on working Americans of the most catastrophic economic policy failure since the 1920s. Economic growth since the late 1970s has been slow and inequitably distributed, largely as a result of poor policy choices. These choices only got worse in the 2000s, leading to an anemic economic expansion. What growth we did see in the economy was fueled by staggering increases in private-sector debt and a housing bubble that artificially inflated wealth by trillions of dollars. As had been predicted, the bursting of the housing bubble had disastrous consequences for the broader economy, spurring a financial crisis and a rise in joblessness that dwarfed those resulting from any recession since the Great Depression. The fallout from the Great Recession makes it near certain that there will be yet another lost decade of income growth for typical families, whose incomes had not been boosted by the previous decade's sluggish and localized economic expansion. In its broad narrative of how the economy has failed to deliver for most Americans over much of the past three decades, the book also offers compelling graphic evidence on jobs, incomes, wages, and other measures of economic well-being most relevant to low-and middle-income workers. It tracks these trends carefully, giving a lesson in economic history that is readable yet rigorous in its analysis.

In recent decades, Tokyo, London, and New York have been the sites of credit bubbles of historically unprecedented magnitude. Central bankers have enjoyed almost unparalleled power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. This book explores how this financialized form of globalism took shape a century ago, when Tokyo joined London and New York as a major financial center. This book shows that close cooperation between central banks began along an unexpected axis, between London and Tokyo, around the year 1900, with the Bank of England's secret use of large Bank of Japan funds to intervene in the London markets. Central-bank cooperation became multilateral during World War I—the moment when Japan first emerged as a creditor country. In 1919 and 1920, as Japan, Great Britain, and the United States adopted deflation policies, the results of cooperation were realized in the world's first globally coordinated program of monetary policy. It was also in 1920 that Wall Street bankers moved to establish closer ties with Tokyo. The text tells the story of how the first age of central-bank power and pride ended in the disaster of the Great Depression, when a rush for gold brought the system crashing down. In all of this, we see also the quiet but surprisingly central place of Japan. We see it again today, in the way that Japan has unwillingly led the world into a new age of post-bubble economics.

Asset prices are driven by public news and information that is dispersed among many market participants. Traditional asset pricing theories have assumed that all investors hold symmetric information. Research in the past two decades has shown that the inclusion of asymmetric information drastically alters traditional results. This book provides a detailed up‐to‐date survey that serves as a map for students and other researchers navigating through this literature.

The book starts by introducing the reader to different knowledge, equilibrium, and efficiency concepts. After explaining no‐trade theorems, it highlights the important role of asymmetric information in explaining the existence and anatomy of bubbles. The subsequent overview of market microstructure models shows how information is reflected in prices and how traders can infer it from prices. Insights derived from herding models are used to provide explanations for stock market crashes. If investors have short horizons, price correcting arbitrage activity is limited and investors have a tendency to focus on the same (possible unimportant) news, a phenomena that led Keynes to compare the stock market with a beauty contest. The book concludes with a brief summary of bank runs and their connection to financial crises.

In summary, models with asymmetric information provide a better understanding of bubbles, crashes, and other market inefficiencies and frictions.

The years from 2000 to 2010 were bookended by two major economic crises. The bursting of the dotcom bubble and the extended bear market of 2000 to 2002 prompted Congress to pass the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, which was directed at core aspects of corporate governance. At the end of the decade came the bursting of the housing bubble, followed by a severe credit crunch, and the worst economic downturn in decades. In response, Congress passed the Dodd–Frank Act, which changed vast swathes of financial regulation. Among these changes were a number of significant corporate governance reforms. This book asks two questions about these changes. First, are they a good idea that will improve corporate governance? Second, what do they tell us about the relative merits of the federal government and the states as sources of corporate governance regulation? Traditionally, corporate law was the province of the states. Today, however, the federal government is increasingly engaged in corporate governance regulation. The changes examined in this work provide a series of case studies in which to explore the question of whether federalization will lead to better outcomes. The book analyzes these changes in the context of corporate governance, executive compensation, corporate fraud and disclosure, shareholder activism, corporate democracy, and declining US capital market competitiveness.