This paper explores the “longevity” of firms, particularly of big businesses in postwar Japan, and investigates some features of Japanese firms from this aspect.
Organizational growth and decline process have been studied in organization theory and business history, though the quantitative aspect of this process has not been examined. I therefore studied this aspect by investigating the longevity of firms, based on studies of organizational ecology and related research. Consideration of longevity presents a new perspective from which to study the activities and organization of firms.
From an analysis of the average number of years in which firms are ranked by total capital, and an event history analysis of the duration of listing in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, I will show that big businesses in the postwar period have especially long lifetimes, and there is no “liability of newness” or “liability of aging” about them; that is, there is no relation between the duration of listing and the rate of elimination from the first section of TSE. Therefore, these big businesses can be regarded as stable entities. It seems reasonable to believe that this stability is related to the Japanese longterm employment system.
I will also show that their longevity increased gradually in the postwar period, but not without fluctuation; it decreased in the first half of the 1960s. This seems to reflect the magnitude of economic change during this period, sometimes referred to as the “transformation period.”
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