This study uses an original dataset of online mid-career job ads for full-time sales jobs collected from July 2018 to December 2019 to examine the use of explicit and implied age limits on job applicants and characteristics of companies that set them. Although Japanese law prohibits age...

Firms commonly use probation to evaluate new hires before making long-term commitments. Workers accepting jobs with a high initial risk of dismissal may expect compensation for this risk. Utilizing an original dataset of Japanese online job ads, this study employs propensity score matching and...

What are the sources of rapid wage growth during a worker’s early career? To address this question, I construct and estimate a model of strategic wage bargaining with on-the-job search to explore three different components of wages: general human capital, match-specific capital, and bargaining...

This paper examines empirically some of the reasons why Japanese manufacturing firms frequently fail to satisfy concavity conditions of the cost function. We focus on the “bubble period” in the 1980s when land was in great demand for reasons related to both production and speculation, and...

After the burst of the bubble economy, Japanese economy has been changed drastically. Traditionally, Japanese economy was characterized as a bank-centered economy, but the banking system did not function well in the 1990's. Responding to banking problems, the Japanese government initiated the...

Recently, credit ratings have been enhancing the influence on issuers as well as the national economy. This paper explains the historical development and several current features of the Japanese bond market, and discusses why credit ratings gained a significant role in the 1990s. We also present...