Since 1977, and in some cases starting before that, most East Asian countries' export patterns in manufacturing have been transformed from industry distributions typical of developing countries to distributions more like those of advanced countries. The process of change in most cases started...

We develop a simple model of the choice between exploiting a technology in another country via export and via direct foreign investment. The model points to the destination country's size, level of technological sophistication, and distance from the source as factors in the decision. Moreover,...

This paper uses aggregate Japanese data and sectoral U.S. data to explore the properties of the joint behavior of stock prices and total factor productivity (TFP) with the aim of highlighting data patterns that are useful for evaluating business cycle theories. The approach used follows that...

Recent empirical work has examined the extent to which international trade fosters international spillovers' of technological information. FDI is an alternate, potentially equally important channel for the mediation of such knowledge spillovers. I introduce a framework for measuring...

Using a unique database on all Japanese manufacturing plants in the United States, we examine the relationship between plant size and growth for these foreign-owned plants. These plants average sizes are three times larger than comparable U.S. plants and experienced 30 percent growth from 1987...

We compute rates of growth in labor productivity during the 1973-80 period for samples of individual manufacturing firms, in both Japan and the U.S., and relate them to differences in the rates of growth in their capital-labor ratios and in their intensities of R&D effort. Japanese firms spent...

In a number of theoretical models, it has been shown that technological externalities can generate multiple equilibria in the global pattern of specialization and trade, with different consequences for the relative welfare of the trading countries. In such models, temporary government policies...

Arthur M. Okun's last book, Prices and Quantities, contributes a theory of universal wage and price stickiness, but provides no explanation at all of historical and cross country differences in behavior. The core of this paper provides a new empirical characterization of price and wage changes...

This paper compares the cyclical and secular behavior of Japanese and U.S. inventories at the aggregate and sectoral level, 1967-1987. While, as is well known, U.S. inventories are sharply procyclical, Japanese inventories are only mildly procyclical. In neither country do inventory and sales...

This paper argues that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings of a universally valid theory of the business cycle, simply because wages are not universally rigid. Several different statistical techniques suggest that wage rates in the U.K. and Japan are between three and 15 times more...