NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES ADOPTIVE EXPECTATIONS: RISING SONS IN JAPANESE FAMILY FIRMS Vikas Mehrotra Randall Morck Jungwook Shim Yupana Wiwattanakantang Working Paper 16874 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16874 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 2011 We are grateful for helpful comments from Joseph Fan, Masaharu Hanazaki, Katsuyuki Kubo, Rafael La Porta, Alice Nakamura, Seki Obata, Hernán Ortiz-Molina, Hugh Patrick, Juro Teranishi sensei, Belen Villalonga, Bernard Yeung, and from seminar and conference participants at the University of Alberta, the University of Calgary, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Columbia University, Dartmouth’s Tuck Business School, Hitotsubashi University, IIM-Bangalore, the Indian School of Business, Kobe University, Kyoto University, London School of Economics, London Business School, the University of Lugano, the National University of Singapore, Osaka University, Purdue University, the 2010 Western Finance Association meetings in Victoria, and the 2010 NBER summer workshop in corporate finance. We acknowledge financial support from the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (the grant number 18203022) provided by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the Murata Foundation, the Japanese Bankers Association Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Ishii Memorial Securities Research Promotion Foundation. All remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2011 by Vikas Mehrotra, Randall Morck, Jungwook Shim, and Yupana Wiwattanakantang. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.