Until early 1960's, the Japanese government controlled import by means of foreign exchange allocation system. Rents generated and allocated by the foreign exchange allocation system provided the government with a powerful tool for industrial policy, although there also existed a possibility that...

In this paper I applied the ideas of evolutionary biology and evolutionary ecology to the empirical analysis on the development of the institutions in postwar Japan. The basic question is how selection and imitation have worked in the evolution of the economic institutions in Japan. I focused on...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the degree of government intervention in the allocation of private bank funds in 1950's Japan. As a part of the transition process to a market economy, financial controls dating since the period of WWII, were abolished in 1949. By the early 1950's, the...

In this paper we analyze the government organization and industrial policies in postwar Japan from comparative institutional perspectives. Industrial policies were drawn up and implemented under different fundamental and organizational environments from period to period. Before the Japanese...

In this paper we examine performance of fiscal policy from a historical standpoint. Before WWII, government expenditure was not a stabilizing factor, but its volatile fluctuation caused instability of the Japanese economy. Especially before WWI, sporadic sharp increase of government expenditure...

After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Japan annexed Korea in 1910. We exploit this event as a natural experiment to investigate the effect of improved market access on the population growth. It is found that the tariff reduction raised the growth rate of population, and...

Mitsubishi Corporation (Mitsubishi Shoji), a trading company under Mitsubishi Zaibatsu, increased its sales rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s, and threatened to catch up with Mitsui & Co. (Mitsui Bussan), the largest trading company in prewar Japan. In this paper, we constructed the data that...

In the late 1940s, the Japanese economy transited to a market economy from an economy under the government planning and control, which had continued since the period of the Sino-Japanese War. This paper explored the impact of the transition on the micro-aspect of the economy, focusing on the...

This paper investigates the extent, determinants, and implications of the political connections of firms at the peak of democracy in prewar Japan, identifying a firm as politically connected if one of its directors was simultaneously a member of the House of Representatives. We analyze the data...

We explore how changes in ownership and managerial control affect the productivity and profitability of producers. Using detailed operational, financial, management, and ownership data from the Japanese cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last century, we find a more nuanced picture than...