The effect of the macroeconomic shock on Japanese exports, caused by the financial crisis, was far more excessive than in other countries. This paper focuses on the relationship between the change in U.S. demand and the Japanese export structure, which was formed before the crisis, as a reason...

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 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...