Change of ownership networks in Japan

Abstract

As complex networks in economics, we consider Japanese shareholding networks as they existed in 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2003. In this study, we use as data lists of shareholders for companies listed on the stock market or on the over-the-counter market. The lengths of the shareholder lists vary with the companies, and we use lists for the top 20 shareholders. We represent these shareholding networks as a directed graph by drawing arrows from shareholders to stock corporations. Consequently, the distribution of incoming edges has an upper bound, while that of outgoing edges has no bound. This representation shows that for all years the distributions of outgoing degrees can be well explained by the power law function with an exponential tail. The exponent depends on the year and the country, while the power law shape is maintained universally. We show that the exponent strongly correlates with the long-term shareholding rate and the cross-shareholding rate.