In an economic geography model with firm heterogeneity, Baldwin and Okubo (2006) show that regional policies for promoting periphery development attract low-productivity firms and adversely affect the productivity gap within a country. This paper empirically examines their theoretical prediction...

Exporters are more productive than non-exporters. Although this is a stylized fact, little is known on regional variations within a country. Based on plant-level longitudinal data covering all manufacturing industries in all regions of Japan, this paper finds that the productivity premium of...

This paper addresses two questions: i) under what circumstances corporate headquarters are separated from production plants, and ii) what types of plants are operated by multi-plant firms. We examine these issues using plant-level manufacturing census data. This paper has two main findings....

Offshoring requires firms to have strong corporate headquarters for monitoring and contracting with suppliers. This paper exploits the unique Japanese firm-level data, which categorizes the type of offshore supplier as: own FDI subsidiaries, subsidiaries owned by other Japanese firms, and...

Recently, great interest has been aroused in the examination of the impact of offshore sourcing, which has increased rapidly across the world and expanded to cover a variety of tasks. Theoretical studies have shown that offshore sourcing contributes to higher productivity. This paper aims to...

This paper empirically examines how technology and capital intensity are related with the firm's global sourcing decision. Firm-level data are derived from a survey covering all manufacturing industries in Japan without any firm-size threshold. Firms are disaggregated by their make-or-buy...

In offshoring, a firm chooses outsourcing to independent suppliers or in-sourcing from their FDI subsidiaries. This paper empirically examines how the factor intensity is related with the firm's offshore make-or-buy decision based on the Japanese direct firm-level data of offshoring across all...

It is noteworthy that multinational firms are beginning to offshore a wide range of operations. Theoretical studies have showed that offshoring contributes to a higher productivity. This paper aims to provide evidence of the effect of offshoring on productivity, on the basis of original 2006...

This paper summarizes main descriptive results from the survey on a wide range of offshore outsourcing and R&D. This survey covers more than five thousand large-sized firms across all manufacturing industries in Japan. The principal findings are as follows. Merely 21% of the firms are...

The endowment effect, established by behavioral economics, is regarded as a cause of inertia. This paper examines its effects on trade policy preferences of 10,000 individuals in Japan. People strongly influenced by the endowment effect are significantly more likely to oppose import...