This paper builds and calibrate a model of competitive search that can reproduce a set of stylized facts concerning major impacts of the decade long stagnation and subsequent changes in the labor market in Japan. We highlight the role played by varying degrees of relation specific investments in...

There exist many symptoms and emerging economic trends suggesting that the Japanese economy is headed in the direction where many European economies ended up in much of 1980s and 1990s. This paper makes highly speculative long-run forecast, based upon a comparison of two stylized models of the...