This paper studies the effects of investment tax credits on firms’ input choices by exploitinga sudden shift in the tax credit rate by firm size for manufacturing firms in Germany in 1999. I find that more generous tax credits lead to a significant increase in both investment and employment,...

Cross-sector labor reallocation is associated with costs at the micro level ranging from the costs of geographical relocation and skill change/adaptation to unemployment. We show that monotonous reallocation paths minimize the aggregate reallocation costs in the three-sector framework (relating...

From the viewpoint of an innovator a patent is a tradeoff between the right to exclude others from using the patented matter versus the requirement to disclose it. Given the sequential nature of many innovations, patent induced technology diffusion can spur technological progress. However,...

The present study aims to verify whether the balance-of-payments constrained growth approach is suitable for explaining the Portuguese growth performance during the last decades. For that, we adopt "Thirlwall's Law" that predicts actual growth by the ratio of the exports growth relative to the...

In Japan, recent low birthrate and aging population have progressively led to a crisis for infrastructure. In particular, the quantity of drainage from homes and factories is remarkably decreasing, along with the decline of economic activity resulting from the overseas move of Japanese...

The South Asia region is home to the largest pool of individuals living under the poverty line, coupled with a fast-growing population. The importance of access to basic infrastructure services on welfare and the quality of life is clear. Yet the South Asia region's rates of access to...

This study develops an easy forecasting model using prefectural data in Japan. The Markov chain known as a stochastic model corresponds to the vector auto-regressive (VAR) model of the first order. If the transition probability matrix can be appropriately estimated, the forecasting model using...

This paper elaborates on how the global discourse on creative economy is interpreted in developing countries. We accomplish this by examining how the discourse has been institutionalized in several Indonesian cities. As an effect of decentralization, localities attempt to become a winner among...

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the change. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at the creating of municipalities of...

The extent and persistence of the inequality of regional output is an important policy issue in China and its sources have been the subject of considerable empirical research. Yet we have relatively little empirical knowledge of the effects on the regional distribution of output of shocks to...