Focusing on Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese firms in the manufacturing sector, this paper examines productivity catch-up at the firm level using the distance from the technology frontier as a direct measure of the potential for catch-up. We also examine the role of absorptive capacity...

Applying a common empirical approach to comparable industry-level data on production, trade,and labor markets for Japan and South Korea, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of outsourcing on different sectors of the labor market focusing on differences in educational attainment. While...

This paper shows that foreign direct investment (FDI), production and trade networks have been a principal driver of East Asian integration. A key element in this has been the role of production sharing, in which different stages of the production process are dispersed across countries in the...

In this paper, we analyzed productivity catching up at the firm level in the Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturing sector using the distance from the global technological frontier as a direct measure of the potential for technological frontier. We also examined the role of the...

This paper compares the performance of foreign-owned and domestically-owned firms, using micro data on Japanese firms in the manufacturing sector for the period 1994-2000. The overall comparison between foreign-owned and Japanese companies shows that foreign-owned companies enjoyed 5% higher TFP...

This paper empirically examines the impact of recent changes in Japan's trade patterns on domestic factor markets. According to our factor content analysis, Japan's net-exports changed in a direction that Japan has come to export more physical and human capital-intensive products over the past...

Using micro-data of the Establishment and Enterprise Census, we compile new statistics on the employment of Japanese affiliates of foreign firms at the 3-digit industry level for the year 1996. We find that the existing official statistics severely underestimate inward FDI. Nevertheless, the...

This paper investigates the deepening of the international division of labor and its effect on factor intensities in Japan, mainly focusing on the manufacturing sector. In the first half of the paper, we analyze factor contents of trade and find that Japan's factor content net-exports of capital...