The Impact of Business Succession Mergers & Acquisitions on SME Survival, Scale, and Transaction Networks: Evidence from Japanese Firm Microdata

This paper examines M&A, representative changes, and business activity changes among Japanese firms in construction, manufacturing, retail, and agriculture using corporate data-based panel summaries and regression results. Firms with M&A experience are larger on average in the pooled descriptive data, but these differences are not exclusively pre-treatment comparisons. Descriptive Kaplan–Meier curves show no uniform M&A survival advantage: company-disappearance profiles differ in manufacturing and retail, while the displayed bankruptcy log-rank tests do not reject equality at the 5% level in any sector. Event-study regressions report cohort-specific coefficients for sales, employment, and customer counts in levels, with firm and year fixed effects and two-way clustered standard errors. The estimated trajectories vary across cohorts and outcomes, and some pre-event differences call for caution in causal interpretation. Conditional Cox models associate M&A with lower exit hazards across all four sectors. The separate counterparty turnover analysis demonstrates qualitative network upgrading rather than mere link-count contraction: in construction, newly added customers exhibit significantly higher capital scale and sales than discontinued partners. Pair regressions identify sector-specific distance and capital associations, and the executive-age analysis finds an M&A-probability discontinuity at absolute age 70 in retail, which disappears when centered around industry retirement peaks. These results distinguish conditional hazards and counterparty restructuring from unadjusted survival comparisons and gross customer counts.