This paper empirically examines the impact of board diversity on firms' innovative activity, taking advantage of the unique firm-level dataset in the period 2000-2011 in Japan. We constructed measurements of the degree of board diversity by using various characteristics of board members such as...

This study applies Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh's method (1996) to measure job creation/destruction rates of establishments in manufacturing firms using Japanese Economic Census data in 2006 and 2009. Results state that the net domestic employment decrease mainly arises from firms without...

This paper examines how Japanese firms' export decision is affected by the availability of information on export markets, focusing on whether the availability of such information has a different impact on the export decision between large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In...

In this article, we examine the change in the wages of regular employed workers through the 1990s and the 2000s using Japanese establishment level data drawn from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure. Contrary to previous literature that found that the wages in the manufacturing industries...

This paper describes the construction of the Regional-Level Japan Industrial Productivity Database (R-JIP), which covers the period from 1970 through 2008 and comprises annual industrial output and factor input data of Japan's 47 prefectures classified by 23 industry. Output is measured in terms...

Concerns over the rise in the vintage of capital in the Japanese economy have focused attention on the technological progress embodied in capital. In this paper, we derive the theoretical relationship between the rate of technological progress embodied in capital, the obsolescence rate of...

Going all the way back to Schumpeter (1934), economists have long discussed whether market competition stimulates innovation. To reconcile conflicting earlier empirical evidence, Aghion and Griffith (2005) developed a model showing that competition can have both a positive and a negative effect...

During the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese manufacturers began to relocate production from sites in Japan to low-wage East Asian countries such as China, Malaysia and Thailand. Imports of manufacturing goods increased substantially over the same period. This rapid rise in imports, and proliferation of...

In the present paper we investigate the causal effect of becoming a multinational on home performance for a large panel of Japanese firms for the period 1995-2002. We adopt matching techniques in combination with a difference-in-difference estimator to evaluate the causal effect of establishing...

This paper explores the impact of offshoring, or contracting out of business activities to foreign providers, on firm productivity, using Japanese firm-level data for the period 1994-2000. We find that offshoring has generally a positive effect on productivity growth. This effect is robust to...