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...

This paper proposes one measure for the productivity of banks and studies how it affects the sensitivity of a client firm's capital investment with respect to investment opportunity. As a direct measure for the productivity of banks, we employ the risk-adjusted profit of an individual bank,...

Using unique Japanese firm-level data for the <i>Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry</i> for 1982-2007, we observed TFP trends in both the manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries. Our results can be summarized as follows. First, TFP growth in the non-manufacturing...

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...

Are watching television and playing video games really harmful for children's development? This is a very intriguing question for both parents and policy circles, although measuring the rigorous effects is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. By making use of a unique...

This study attempts to characterize the trade-off between time spent on educational activities and that spent on alternative activities such as watching television or playing video games. Utilizing a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, robust evidence was found for a negative causal...

This study examined the extent to which the inequality of opportunity exists in Japan, using a classical twin design. Participants were 1,006 working, male twins (738 identical and 268 fraternal twins; age 20–60) recruited via a web-based survey. Participants responded to the questions of...

This study attempts to further our understanding of social-class-based differences of school-aged children's effort levels by shedding light on the beginning of the inequality. Using four waves (from 1st to 4th grade students) of the Longitudinal Survey of Babies in the 21st Century collected in...

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...