The purpose of this chapter is to take a closer look at the role of legal institutions and their impact on human capital accumulation using the Japanese case of dismissal regulation as an example. In the Japanese labor markets, so called the Doctrine of Abusive Dismissal has been thought to be...

Two stylized facts characterized Japan during the so-called Lost Decade (1992-2005): rising wage inequalities and increasing productivity differentials at the firm level. Surprisingly, these features have never been connected in the literature. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing...

Bayesian analysis of a stochastic volatility model with a generalized hyperbolic (GH) skew Student's t-error distribution is described where we first consider an asymmetric heavy-tailness as well as leverage effects. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation method is described exploiting...

This paper seeks to analyze determinants of Asian countries' comparative advantage in the automotive industry. The effects of supporting industries, factor availability, factor intensity, transportation costs, and of the scale of foreign investment in the industry on the level of countries'...

How significantly inter-industry wage differentials contribute to rising income inequality is an essential policy issue for transitional economies. Using regression-based inequality decomposition, this paper finds that inter-industrial wage differentials contributed increasingly to income...

In October 2000, the Korean Fair Trade Commission levied a combined surcharge of 190 billion Korean won (roughly $170 million) against the five major oil refineries in Korea for colluding in the military oil procurement auctions between 1998 and 2000. At the time, it was a record surcharge ever...

By using microdata of Employment Status Survey between 1982 and 2007, this article describes several aspects on the non-regular employees in the Japanese labor markets. The main findings are as follows: (1) the increased non-regular employees are eregularf in terms of contractual length but...

This paper studies the international transmission effects of the news about the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of the US to the Canadian economy. First, using the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), the impulse responses of Canadian macroeconomic variables to the US news shock are estimated....