In this paper we survey the literature on the role of communities in the development of a market economy in Japan. The role of communities has long been explored implicitly as well as explicitly in the literature on the Japanese economic history. In this survey we focus on the export industries...

　　 In 1932, the Kwantung Army occupied Manchuria, the northeast part of China, and founded a puppet state, Manchukuo. The Kwantung Army and the Manchukuo government intended to develop heavy and chemical industries as well as munitions industries there, but they did not have a...

　　 During the World War II, Japan occupied a large part of East and South East Asia, called "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" (Daitoa Kyoei Ken). This paper overviews what the Japanese military authorities and the government did to develop the occupied areas in the 1930s and...

This paper investigates the sequence of trade liberalization in postwar Japan and its determinants. As the Japanese government utilized the foreign exchange allocation system as a tool for the industrial policy, especially for protecting domestic industries, in the 1950s, trade liberalization...

In this paper, we explore the structure and implications of interbank networks in prewar Japan, focusing on director interlocking. We find that approximately half the banks had at least one connection with another bank through director interlocking, and that a bank that had connections with...

After WWI, the Japanese economy experienced a structural change characterized by the emergence of large firms and increased numbers of white-collar workers. This paper explores how the human capital of white-collar workers was formed, using micro personnel data from Mitsubishi zaibatsu (business...

This paper presents the intra-firm trade network in Mitsubishi Corporation (Mitsubishi Shoji) in the 1920s. In this period, Mitsubishi Co. established a global branch network to expand trades. Using original documents of Mitsubishi Co., we obtained the data on the trade flow between every pair...

This paper explores the flow of funds inside Mitsubishi Bank during the Second World War, focusing on the impacts of acquisition of Daihyaku Bank in 1943 and the Designated Financial Institution System in 1944. Acquisition of Daihyaku Bank substantially expanded the branch network of Mitsubishi...

This paper analyzes the role of the merchant coalition (kabu nakama) in Japan in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, from the standpoint of Historical Institutional Analysis (Greif[1997]). The quantitative economic history literature has made clear that sustainable...

One of the main implications of the New Economic Geography, developed since the 1990s, is that a temporary shock can create a persistent impact on the geographic distribution of economic activities because of multiple equilibria. This paper investigates the long-run impact of a temporary shock...