This paper compares two policies: trade cost reduction and firm relocation cost reduction using a three-country version of a heterogeneous-firms geography and trade model, where the three countries have different market (population) sizes. We show how the effects of the two policies differ, in...

This paper empirically tests relationships among interregional labour migration, wage, and real market potential (RMP) based on a multi-region economic geography model, which describes bilateral migration flows. We estimate a nonlinear gravity model using manufacturing workers' migration flows...

This paper analyzes the impact of firm networks on Japan's national border effect. We estimate gravity equations using data on Japan's international and interregional trade in four machinery industries (electrical, general, precision and transportation machinery). The machinery sector is the...

Do regional policies for promoting periphery development attract high- or low-productivity firms? Though whether policies improve the core-periphery productivity gap hinges on this question, no consensus is found in theoretical models. This paper uses plant-level data covering all regions in...

This paper studies anti-agglomeration subsidies in a core-periphery setting when firms are heterogeneous in labour productivity, focusing on the effects of a relocation subsidy on firm location in various tax-financing schemes (local versus global). We discuss how a subsidy can enhance welfare...

This paper reports estimates based on long-run data sets for GDP and trade, with three subsamples chosen to reflect the first globalization period, the "bloc economy" period and the second globalization period. The business cycle is identified as the series of deviates from a Hodrick-Prescott...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

Recent trade models determine the equilibrium distribution of firm-level efficiency endogenously and show that freer trade shifts the distribution towards higher average productivity due to entry and exit of firms. These models ignore the possibility that freer trade also alters the firm-size...

In order to gain a greater understanding of firms' 'environmental behaviour' this paper explores the factors that influence firms' emissions intensities and provides the first analysis of the determinants of firm level carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Focussing on Japan, the paper also examines...

This paper empirically examines how the shapes of plant productivity distributions vary across regions based on Japan's manufacturing census. We focus on the skewness to examine the asymmetry by estimating the gamma distribution at the plant level. By linking the estimated shape parameters with...