2021 Volume 10 Issue 2 Pages 37-53
Companies are expected to establish accountability and address shareholders' questions during annual shareholder meetings. Nevertheless, in Japan, the meeting dates of listed companies tend to concentrate on a specific time frame in late June. Shareholders with diversified stock portfolios may encounter difficulties in attending such meetings owing to overlapping dates. Therefore, shareholders can neither participate in arguments during meetings nor gain information from meetings; accordingly, meeting dates should be dispersed, and opportunities for shareholders to participate in such meetings should be guaranteed. Thus, identifying firm-specific characteristics that help avoid overlapping meeting dates or contribute to the dispersion of meeting dates is crucial to research.
The present study empirically reveals that companies with a more aggressive transparency-oriented stance on internal control system development hold annual shareholder meetings when fewer companies do, after controlling other factors that affect the dispersion of meeting dates. Primarily, this study indicates that such companies hold their meetings on dates with the lowest concentration of meetings, after controlling these factors. Thus, the study provides evidence that a great transparency-oriented corporate stance regarding internal control system development, which is the corporate perception that no one can directly observe, is a firm-specific characteristic contributing to the dispersion of annual shareholder meeting dates.
First, using quantitative text analysis, this study measures and quantifies a transparency-oriented corporate stance by examining companies' timely disclosure of basic policies on internal control system development in compliance with the Japanese Companies Act. Furthermore, this study examines the causal relationship between such a stance and the dispersion of the dates of annual shareholder meetings.
