Because of the unstable financial market after World War I, the Japanese financial system experienced a wave of bank mergers, which resulted in an increase in bank scale and the development of branch banking. In this paper, we explored the implications of the expansion of branch banking, using...

This paper develops a new approximation formula for pricing basket options in a local-stochastic volatility model with jumps. In particular, the model admits local volatility functions and jump components in not only the underlying asset price processes, but also the volatility processes. To the...

For estimating the integrated volatility and covariance by using high frequency data, Kunitomo and Sato (2011, 2013) have proposed the Separating Information Maximum Likelihood (SIML) method when there are micro-market noises. The SIML estimator has reasonable nite sample properties and...

After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Japan annexed Korea in 1910. We exploit this event as a natural experiment to investigate the effect of improved market access on the population growth. It is found that the tariff reduction raised the growth rate of population, and...

Japan experienced high growth of TFP following World War II. This paper studies the sources of this technological growth and documents the role played by different government policies in achieving such growth. We find that in nonagricultural sectors, TFP growth occurred at first through the...

Bertola/Caballero (1994) and Abel/Eberly (1996) extended Jorgenson's classical model of firms' optimal investment. By introducing investment frictions, they were able to capture the role of future anticipations in investment decisions as well as the lumpy and intermittent nature of investment...

This paper overviews the industrial organization in Japan between the two World Wars. In this period, the change in the industrial structure gave a substantial impact on the industrial organization. On one hand, development of the heavy industries, which had been highly concentrated, raised the...

This paper proposes a new three-factor model with stochastic mean reversions for commodity prices and derives the closed-form solution for the term structure of futures prices. Moreover, it is confirmed that the prices of crude oil and copper futures prices estimated by our model replicate the...

This article proposes a Bayesian estimation method of demand functions under block rate pricing, focusing on increasing one. Under this pricing structure, price changes when consumption exceeds a certain threshold and the consumer faces a utility maximization problem subject to a...

Estimation of small area means under a basic area level model is studied, using an empirical Bayes (best) estimator or a weighted estimator with fixed weights. Mean squared errors (MSEs) of the estimators and nearly unbiased (or exactly unbiased) estimators of MSE are derived under three...