This paper examines the impact of new technology on plant-level productivity in the Japanese steel industry during the 1950's and 1960's. We estimate the production function, considering the differences in technology between the refining furnaces owned by a plant. We find that a more productive...

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 paper examines intra-plant diffusion of new technology in the Japanese steel industry. The introduction of the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) was the greatest breakthrough in steel refining in the last century. Using unique panel data, the paper estimates total factor productivity by technology...

This paper proposes an approach for a robust tracking method to the objects intersection with appearances similar to a target object. The target is image sequences taken by a moving camera in this paper. Tracking methods using color information tend to track mistakenly a background region or an...