We estimate output and population of colonial Korea to show that per capita output grew 2.3% with population expanding 1.3% per year from 1911 to 1940. Growth accounting indicated that productivity advance accounted for roughly one half of the per capita output growth. Primary production as a...

This study calculates Robert Allen's "welfare ratio" for eleven cities in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan from 1900-39. Although considerable gap in prices and nominal wages existed, real wages remained roughly comparable in the 1910s in different cities of East Asia outside Manchuria, where...

Korekiyo Takahashi is remembered as a wise finance minister saving Japan from the Great Depression, but the role of his policy remains to be rigorously measured, with proper control for other forces also driving the recovery. Vector autoregression analysis of previously unexploited monthly data...

The orthodoxy in South and North Korean historiography states that Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 wrought havoc on indigenous economic development and started an era of exploitation lasting until 1945. Recent studies show the claim to be based less upon facts than upon Marxist dogma and...

By rejecting government's bailout requests, the Bank of Japan knowingly caused a banking panic and cabinet change in 1927. The central bank was neither acting as a political agent, nor trying to deal with moral hazards. The refusal was to sustain monetary contraction aimed at lifiting gold...