The sales tax would seem to be a good candidate for subnational taxes. It is a broad based tax whose base is relatively evenly distributed across regions, and is a revenue raising component of the tax mix, rather than one used for redistributive purpose. The purpose of this paper is to...

The Japanese government, in collaboration with local governments, guarantees the credit of small businesses. During the last decade, it spent annually an average of 2 billion US dollars under these programs. In addition, during the last stage of the Japan's "financial crisis" (Oct. 1998-Mar....

There have been large fluctuations observed in major macro-economic variables in Japan. When the official seasonal adjustment such as U.S. Census X-12-ARIMA is used, it has been important to make the change point analysis carefully. We illustrate the related problems by using recent official...

This paper analyses the effects of schooling, outside work experience and job tenure on human capital formation, using the personal history data of white collar employees of Mitsubishi Zaibatsu in prewar Japan. For all samples including both engineers and clerks, the rate of return to schooling...

Under the financial turbulence, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) had launched a series of unprecedented monetary policies in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The conventional monetary policies were not effective under liquidity trap. However, some unconventional monetary policies, including zero...

This paper investigates how ownership changes affect the plant performance, focusing on the cotton spinning industry in early twentieth century Japan, where many plants experienced ownership changes. Through analyses of detailed plant-level data, it is revealed that, after ownership changes,...

This is a short essay motivated by the author's concern about the creation of a new series of lumpy credit risk exposures entering Japanese bank portfolios, in particular through recent c omeback of real estate transactions. The essay will be printed in "Keizai Kyousitsu" of the Nikkei Morning...

This exploratory paper deals with some basic concepts of architectural strategy, or application of the concept of architecture to strategic management, as well as the issue of measuring architecture. First, the paper discusses definitions and types of product architecture, including integral,...

We propose a Separation Theorem of Active Management. It asserts that in the so-called Enhanced Active Portfolio framework the efficient frontier is linear in the active return/active risk space, and one can separate the determination of optimal active portfolio weights from the determination of...

During the Second World War, aircraft production in Japan, which had been negligible before that, increased sharply. The rapid expansion of the aircraft industry involved numerous small and medium-sized machinery factories, which were organized to be parts suppliers by aircraft assemblers....