Despite its significant influence on the actual enforcement of the law, the economic cost of court discretion has been ignored in the literature on employment protection. This paper exploits a distinctive feature of the Japanese judicial system, periodic judge transfers, to identify court...

This paper constructs a two-country model of international trade to study how labor market frictions affect industry location patterns, unemployment rates, and fully endogenous productivity growth. We show that when the larger country offers subsidies to labor search costs or reduces...

The goal of this paper is to detect the degree to which court decisions control the stringency of employment protection and to investigate how such judicial discretion affects labor market performance. However, identification difficulty arises because court decisions are volatile against...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of better judicial enforcement on the probability of being credit rationed, loan size, and the probability of bankruptcy using household-level data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, conducted by the Institute for Research...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of better judicial enforcement on the probability of being credit rationed, loan size, and the probability of bankruptcy using household-level data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, conducted by the Institute for Research...

This study aims to examine how each cohort’s family formation is affected by labor market conditions experienced in youth in Japan. Although deterioration in youth employment opportunities has often been blamed for Japan’s declining marriage and fertility rates, the effects of slack labor...

The main purpose of this paper is to study how the individual differences in non-cognitive skills, as measured by Big-Five personality traits, explain the variation in labor market outcomes. By analyzing the Japanese and US survey data, this study attempts to analyze how personality traits are...

The search for new ideas by profit-seeking firms and knowledge spillovers are well-known and fundamental sources of modern economic growth. This paper examines the implications of idea production and knowledge capital for monetary business cycles. We construct a sticky-wage model where workers...

Following the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy may be significantly changed relative to the pre-pandemic world. One critical shift induced by the COVID- 19 pandemic is a need for physical distance (at least 6 feet apart) between workers and customers. In this study, we examine the...

When faced with economic stagnation, innovation, product innovation in particular, is often cited as an effective stimulus because it is thought to encourage household consumption and lead to higher demand. Using a secular stagnation model with wealth preference, we examine the effects of...