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...

This paper examines whether or not privatization of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) increases the probability of exporting, and, if so, what channels generate such effect. Using firm-level data for the Chinese manufacturing sector for the period 2000-2007, we find that privatization has a...

This paper empirically studies the impact of banks' efficiency on their client firms' export behavior. Our empirical analysis shows that the marginal impact of the total factor productivity (TFP) of cash-flow constrained firms to the extensive margin of exports increases as the efficiency of top...

We investigate whether previous findings of only limited effects of investing abroad on the performance of parent firms can be explained by the aggregation of heterogeneous effects depending on the motive for foreign direct investment (FDI), sector, and location. Our results suggest, in line...

Using panel data on Japanese mothers, this paper estimates the impact of fertility on maternal labor supply using twins as an instrument for the total number of children. We find that having twins actually has a longer term positive impact on maternal labor force participation. To understand...

This paper investigates whether birth weight itself causes individuals' future life chances. By using a sample of twins in Japan and controlling for the potential effects of genes and family backgrounds, we examine the effect of birth weight on later educational and economic outcomes. The most...

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...

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...

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...