The purpose of this study is to reexamine two empirical regularities in the Japanese labor market : the constant labor share and Okun's law. The former law relates to the price of labor in the labor market while the latter is a quantity law; they represent suitable benchmarks for judging the...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...

The unique way of financing housing through the mandatory savings system in Singapore has created a class of asset-rich and cash-poor Singaporeans. This paper provides a framework to assess the viability of a reverse mortgage (RM) market so that such instruments may be harnessed as a source of...

This paper considers the efficiency properties of risk-neutral workers mobility decisions in an equilibrium model with search frictions, but no search externalities, when the rent accruing to a match is split through bargaining. Matches are ex ante homogeneous and their true productivity is...

This paper demonstrates how family size can be an important contributor to poverty in the Philippines. It examines one of the mechanisms behind this link by focusing on the relation between number of children and the decision to seek a job and parents' wage earnings. It surveys the international...

The paper examines the impact of stock market liberalisation on four industry-level economic variables, i) growth in real value added, ii) growth in real wages per worker, iii) growth in the number of employees and iv) growth in the number of firms using data on 18 developing countries for the...

The results highlight the conflicting interests of countries — to stabilize exchange rates or to keep the option of exchange rate depreciation in order to maintain competitiveness of domestic tradable producers. With deepening integration in East Asia, however, the desire for exchange...

This paper investigates the effect of regional borders on trade in Asia. The regional borders define the three regions of Asia : South, Southeast, and East Asia. Regional trade indicates the flows of trade within a region, whereas regional border trade means trade across regions. A gravity model...

We present a theoretical framework for policy making based on the “impossible trinity†or the “trilemma†hypothesis. A simple optimization model shows that placing more weight in terms of preference for each of the three open macroeconomic policies—exchange rate...