This paper reviews a decade of implementation of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) program in Japan, which is now experiencing unprecedented pressure from its rapidly aging population. This overview of the program's features focuses on the incentive mechanisms and diversity, and...

This paper examines the impact of the 1995 Kobe earthquake on the survival of manufacturing plants and their post-earthquake economic performance. The evidence from macroeconomic studies of the impact of natural disasters on economic growth is mixed with some papers finding a small negative...

Wholesalers are considered to play an important role in ensuring efficient transaction networks. Using unique data on Japanese domestic transactions compiled by Tokyo Shoko Research, we investigate wholesalers' roles in transaction networks for intermediate manufacturing goods. Comparing...

This paper uses a monopolistic competitive framework with many sectors to study the impact of trade liberalization on local and global emissions. We focus on the interplay of the pollution haven effect and the home market effect and show how a large-market advantage can counterbalance a high...

This paper starts out from the observation that the export shares of firms (export to sales ratio) vary greatly among firms, and tend to be systematically related to the firms' capital labour ratios. This observation cannot be explained by e.g. the standard Melitz model, since it predicts that...

We explore the effects of domestic environmental standards when a domestic firm and a foreign rival compete in the domestic market. We focus on a situation where the introduction of environmental standards forces the foreign product out of the domestic market because it does not meet the...

This paper addresses two questions: i) under what circumstances corporate headquarters are separated from production plants, and ii) what types of plants are operated by multi-plant firms. We examine these issues using plant-level manufacturing census data. This paper has two main findings....

Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of firms shifting stages of their production processes overseas. In this paper we investigate whether firms outsource the dirtier stages of production to minimise domestic environmental regulation costs - a process broadly consistent...

The present paper focuses on sorting as a mechanism behind the well-established fact that there is a central region productivity premium. Using a model of heterogeneous firms that can move between regions, Baldwin and Okubo (2006) show how more productive firms sort themselves to the large core...

This paper explores the role of multi-product plants and product switching in the Japanese manufacturing sector. While a substantial body of work has explored the importance of the extensive margins of plant entry and exit in employment and output flows, only recently has research begun to...