This paper examines the economic impact of re-invention - the degree to which an innovation is modified by user - on industry growth and productivity. The paper focuses on two re-inventions made by a Japanese steel company; these inventions improved the productive efficiency of Austrian-made...

This report summarizes main results from the questionnaire concerning industrial electricity demand conducted to individual Japanese factories located in the Kanto and Kinki regions in the fall of 2012. The questionnaire is particularly interested in evaluating a new price scheme for the purpose...

This paper estimates a dynamic oligopoly model to assess the economic consequences of a horizontal merger that took place in 1970 to create the second largest global producer of steel. The paper solves a Markov perfect Nash equilibrium for the model and simulates the welfare effects of the...

This paper examines the intra-firm diffusion of new technology in the Japanese steel industry. The introduction of the basic oxygen furnace was the greatest breakthrough in steel refining in the last century. Using unique panel data concerning capital utiliza- tion, the paper estimates total...

Models of vintage-capital learning by doing predict an initial fall in productivity after the introduction of new technology. This paper examines the impact of new technology on plant-level productivity in the Japanese steel industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The introduction of the basic oxygen...

The role of R&D diversification has been explained by the fact that there exist knowledge spillovers among research programs within a firm. However, the benefit from diversification is not ensured by internal spillovers only. Knowledge can spill over not only within a firm, but also across...

Using a panel of 30 Japanese chemical and pharmaceutical companies for the period of 1985 to 1998, we estimate the effects of university-industry research collaboration (UIC) on participating firms' research output. We find, as in other studies in the field, that UIC leads to more research...