Globalization of business leads to environmental uncertainty for corporate organizations. To establish competitive advantage, organizations need continuous introduction of new products and services to markets and quick implementation of new strategies. This paper shows what kinds of initiatives...

A decomposition of the gender gap in earned income among white-collar regular employees in Japan was conducted using the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux method based on propensity-score weighting. The results show that gender differences in three human-capital variables, namely, education, age, and the...

This paper has constructed a theoretical model to explain why the share of those who remain unmarried has increased in Japan. It is still common for women to leave the labor market due to marriage and thereby see an irreversible decrease in their income. Taking into consideration of the...

Employing massive contract- and firm-level data provided by the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Unit of the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC), one of the largest government lending institutions for SMEs, and linking the data with other firm-level data from a business credit information company,...

In treaty-based investment arbitration, tribunals quite often render their awards referring to the protection of the investor's legitimate expectations. A number of tribunals deal with this issue in the context of the application of the fair and equitable treatment clause and argue that the...

Japanese labor and employment law is based on the "command-and-control" model in which the government sets uniform minimum labor standards and enforces them through penalties and administrative inspections while leaving the determination of above-the-standard working conditions to employers,...

Research in psychology and neuroscience has shown that negative emotions such as depression and anxiety affect decision making in such a way that these emotions lead to pessimistic risk estimates. To see if this is applicable to consumer confidence, we conducted preliminary experiments. In the...

There has recently been increasing attention paid to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a treatment for depression, despite its limitations such as a shortage of therapists. Therefore, computerized-CBT (CCBT) was developed to overcome this issue. Within our meta-analysis of adult depression...

This paper examines the determinants of individuals' preferences of trade policies, using micro data on the policy preferences of 10,000 individuals in Japan. Particularly, we focus on the effect of regional factors on trade policy preferences, considering the fact that there is a significant...

Recent developments in empirical studies have shown that an increase in minimum wages has a non-negative overall employment effect, which is inconsistent with the prediction generated by the textbook competitive labor market model. This paper examines the mechanism that explicitly explains this...