competitive firms. The results in our paper suggest that when it comes to TFP growth, this view of Japan is seriously erroneous …. We find that lower tariffs and higher import volumes would have been particularly beneficial for Japan during the period … productivity growth. Our findings on Japan suggest that the salutary impact of imports stems more from their contribution to …

. Little attention is paid in Japan to substitution biases and quality upgrading. This implies that important methodological … differences have emerged between the U.S. and Japan since the U.S. started to correct for these biases in 1999. We estimate that … using the new corrected U.S. methodology, Japan's deflation averaged 1.2 percent per year since 1999. This is more than …

We analyze fiscal policy and fiscal sustainability in Japan using a variant of the methodology developed in Blanchard … (1990). We find that Japan can achieve fiscal sustainability over a 100-year horizon with relatively small changes in the …. This means that monetization of the debt will have little impact on Japan's fiscal sustainability because Japan's problem …

for forty regions of Japan. Our results identify important effects of a region's own size, as well as cost linkages …-Arrow-Romer externalities do not appear to be robust in our data. Landlocked status does not matter for productivity of regions in Japan. The … differences. A simple counterfactual shows that if economic activity were spread evenly over the forty regions of Japan, aggregate …

returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan …