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 economic rise of Japan in the 1980s was underpinned by commitment to catching up through domestic reform and accommodated externally within the framework of the postwar multilateral institutions like the GATT/WTO. Regional cooperative processes like APEC later complemented that framework,...

The spread of regional trade agreements (RTAs) in Southeast Asia has ignited a debate about their impact on business, and ways to avoid raising the business costs from the Asian ‘noodle bowl’ effect. This paper undertakes a comparative and firm-level analysis of the impact of RTAs...

With the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the world’s largest trading nation (measured by trade value) and second largest economic power (measured by GDP), its economic influence over the neighboring emerging economies in East Asia has also risen. The PRC introduced...