To explore the propagation of undesirable policies in a form of populist extremism, we construct a social learning model featuring agency problems. Politicians in different countries sequentially implement a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by...

This study examines the effect of yardstick regulation in Japan's gas distribution sector, especially focusing on its effect of reducing the adverse selection problem. The Japanese government has regulated the price of city gas supplies by a combination of fixed-price regulation and ex-ante...

Constructing a strong and unique instrument for bank capital from the empirical observation of Japanese banks' past behavioral changes, we identify the impact of capital adequacy on the allocation of bank lending supply across low quality and high quality borrowers. We find that, in FY 1997, a...

The underlying causes of sharp declines in bank lending during recessions in large developed economies, as exemplified by the U.S. in the early 1990s and Japan in the late 1990s, are still being debated due to a lack of any convincing identification strategy of the supply side capital-lending...

Demsetz and Lehn (1985), Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny (1988), and McConnell and Servaes (1990) report different empirical findings regarding ownership structure and corporate profitability. In this paper, we re-estimate the relation between management ownership and firm's value after controlling...

This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV) estimator for consistent estimation of dynamic panel data models with a multifactor error structure when both N and T, the cross-sectional and time series dimensions respectively, are large. Our approach projects out the common factors from...

This study examines whether individuals' time preferences are affected by the damage resulting from the tsunami in the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, using panel surveys before and after the earthquake. When the change in time preferences is measured using the (â, ä) model, I find that...

In this paper, we propose a robust approach against heteroskedasticity, error serial correlation and slope heterogeneity for large linear panel data models. First, we establish the asymptotic validity of the Wald test based on the widely used panel heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

This paper argues that the persistence of greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) comes from information frictions. First, our simple social learning model shows that, through signaling effects, information frictions generate persistent greenfield FDI inflows. Second, we show empirically that...