In a country where individualism is not valued, we ask whether the CEO (shacho) of a Japanese corporation affects corporate behavior. To answer this question, we construct a shacho-firm matched panel data set in the period 1990 through 2002 of all listed 1,419 Japanese manufacturing firms and...

Applying a common empirical approach to comparable industry-level data on production, trade, and labor markets for Japan and South Korea, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of outsourcing on different sectors of the labor market focusing on differences in educational attainment. While...

Adoption of new technology requires diversion of resources from direct production activities to learning/adjusting activities, which could reduce productivity temporarily. Focusing on the existence of such "learning cost", we derive a simple model on the optimal timing for technology upgrading....

This paper argues, both theoretically and empirically, that sometimes no security law may be better than a good security law that is not enforced. The first part of the paper formalizes the sufficient conditions under which this happens for any law. The second part of the paper shows that a...