This paper studies the effects of the loss of skills on the persistence of unemployment and other macroeconomic variables. It combines a Real Business Cycle model with a search and matching labor market to explain how the loss of skill of workers and the subsequent decrease in their probability...

The proportion of informal or unprotected workers in developing countries is large. In developing economies, the fraction of informal workers can be as high as 70% of total employment. For economies with significant informal sectors, business cycle fluctuations and labor market policy...

The paper constructs a consistent set of quarterly Japanese data for the 1960-2002 sample period and compares properties of the Japanese and U.S. business cycles. We document some important differences in the adjustment of labor input between the two countries. In Japan most most of the...

Japan experienced high growth of TFP following World War II. This paper studies the sources of this technological growth and documents the role played by different government policies in achieving such growth. We find that in nonagricultural sectors, TFP growth occurred at first through the...

This is a matching model with two types of skills, low and high, where the high skill is acquired through training in schools, the introduction of which is the main innovation of this paper. The search externalities make the competitive equilibrium differ from the social planners steady state...

Unemployment, job nding, and job separation rates exhibit patterns of decline as worker age increases in the U.S. We build and numerically simulate a search and matching model of the labor market that incorporates a life-cycle structure to account for these empirical facts. The model features...

The problem of estimating the common regression coefficients is addressed in this paper for two regression equations with possibly different error variances. The feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) estimators have been believed to be admissible within the class of unbiased estimators. It...

Banks are recognized as playing an important role of monitoring borrowers, thereby reducing the agency costs associated with informational asymmetry. However, there remains an issue "who could monitor the banks", because it is difficult for outsiders to monitor banks' management. In particular,...

This paper discusses a novel estimation method for the residential gas demand function in Japan where the price per unit decreases as the demand exceeds certain thresholds. Such a price system is known as decreasing block rate pricing. The demand function under decreasing block rate pricing is...

Economic development in Southeast Asia has been associated with environmental degradation. Its cause is mainly attributed to rapid industrialization, coupled with urbanization and export growth, whereas the vicious circle of the poverty and the contamination is a minor case. The environmental...