This paper studies the intranational business cycle - that is the set of regional (prefecture) business cycles - in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series and relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify...

This paper re-estimates the correlation between trade and business cycle synchronization. Different from other previous studies, we employ long-run GDP and trade data and use the GDP cross-correlation index a la Cerqueira and Martins (2009) rather than over-time cross-correlations. We find a...

This paper studies the intranational business cycle - that is the set of regional (prefectural) business cycles - in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series of relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify...

This paper contributes to the small but growing body of literature which tries to explain why, despite the predictions of some theoretical studies, empirical support for the pollution haven hypothesis remains limited. We break from the previous literature, which tends to concentrate on US trade...

One channel through which environment is damaged is consumption. To protect environment, various product standards are introduced all over the world. By using a new economic geography framework, this paper explores the effects of environmental product standards on environment in a North-South...

Heterogeneity in firm productivity affects the location patterns of firm and agglomeration. Here we provide an economic geography model, involving forward and backward linkages driven by the migration of a footloose entrepreneur (capital owner) with different productivity. As a result we find a...

Despite the world-wide spread of economic blocs following the Great Depression, Japan sought to find trade partners outside of its own bloc and to maintain a relationship with some foreign blocs, in particular maintaining a connection with the British Commonwealth and the Sterling bloc. The...

This paper studies tax competition in a setting that allows for agglomeration economies and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves the large country charging a higher tax than the small nation, with this rate being too low from a social point of view. Tighter integration...

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

In an economic geography model with firm heterogeneity, Baldwin and Okubo (2006) show that regional policies for promoting periphery development attract low-productivity firms and adversely affect the productivity gap within a country. This paper empirically examines their theoretical prediction...