We use the result from a survey of Japanese firms in manufacturing and service to investigate the choice of wage and employment adjustments when they needed to reduce substantially the total labor cost. Our regression analysis indicates that the large size reduction favors the layoffs of the...

We use a survey of the Japanese youth within 10 year after high school graduation to investiage the impacts of the academic and social skills on their success in the job market. We find three major factors account for the job market outcome immediately after school: school characteristics and...

This paper uses a unique survey of the Chinese youth to construct a panel data in which we keep track of geographical and job mobilities. Our estimation results deliver the following major findings. (1) The sample individuals are highly mobile. Job quits and relo- cations are frequent and they...

We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete - choice, finite - horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross - country differences in the relative success of players. While we...

There is substantial cross - country variation in secondary school design, with some countries tracking students into different ability schools very early, and other countries with little or no tracking at all. Does tracking length affects school performance, as measured by standardized test...

There exist many symptoms and emerging economic trends suggesting that the Japanese economy is headed in the direction where many European economies ended up in much of 1980s and 1990s. This paper makes highly speculative long-run forecast, based upon a comparison of two stylized models of the...