Industrial clusters and factory industries co-develop during industrialization and the relational contracts between manufacturers and subcontractors are the organizational basis of clusters. We predict that relational transactions between manufacturers and subcontractors and cooperative action...

Japan experienced falling asset prices, financial market reform, and non-performing loan reductions from the late 1990s. We examine whether it was appropriate to guide the banking sector to aggressively write off non-performing loans in the early 2000s under the shadow of regulatory reform and...

Transaction costs depend on the degree of informational asymmetry in trading goods. This environment provides commitment to certain quality with an opportunity to earn quality premium given the degree of asymmetry. A device of commitment to quality could be inspection and branding either by a...

Transition between private governance mechanism and the state court is not necessarily unidirectional. This research assumes that non-monotonic changes in governance mechanism comes from complementarity between the private and public mechanisms when neither of both is sufficiently efficient....

An intrinsic feature of a pre-modern society is in its fragmentary markets. Fragmentary markets are more likely to fail in the coordination of resource allocation. However, if a concentrated market is exogenously formed and the market could provide the only price to local markets, the market can...

Japan experienced a rapid expansion of the capital market in the 1880-1900s, introducing Western institutions combining it with Japanfs traditional bond market regime, which provided financial source of industrialization. The rapid expansion of the infant capital market was in fact accelerated...

The modern contract law generally does not allow a perfected claim to be placed on employees. This constraint makes a claim to the return on employer's investment in recruiting and training a worker vulnerable against a possible bystanders' infringement on the claim. Accordingly, employers might...

Long-term employment and internal promotion at major firms are common in developed economies. We examine the long-range changes in the returns on skill elements and training using a micro dataset of a Japanese ironworks. We show that, 1) the return on schooling rose from the late 1940s and that...

Employers use educational background as a signal of a workerfs latent ability. This signaling effect decreases as employers learn about the workerfs ability with his/her work experience, which results in negative coefficient of interaction term between schooling and experience in wage equation....

Under the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1868, registered peasants were guaranteed their residual claim to crop from their land, but shielded from the market risk. Provided with incentives for productivity increase but protected from the market risk, millions of peas-ant family continuously managed...