Komatsu Limited (hereinafter referred as Komatsu) is a major construction equipment manufacturer founded in 1921. Komatsu Iron Works, which manufactured mining machinery and machine tools for its parent company, Takeuchi Mining Industry, which was engaged in coal-mining and mining, spun off as...

We study how the level of trade costs and the intensity of competition can explain the existence of two-way, one-way or no trade within the same industry. As trade costs decrease from very high to very low values, the economy moves from autarky to a regime of two-way trade, through a regime of...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition and derive a complete characterization of the market equilibrium using the concept of Relative Love for Variety. When the RLV increases with individual consumption, the market generates pro-competitive effects. When it decreases, the market...

In recent years there has been 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...

We study a one-dimensional voting game in which voters choose a policy from a one-dimensional policy set over which voters have single-peaked preferences. The purpose of this paper is to analyze coalitional behaviors under any given voting mechanism. We employ the notion of strong Nash...

Studies using the dynamic panel regression approach have found the speed of income convergence among the world and regional economies to be high. For example, Lee et al. (1997, 1998) report the income convergence speed to be 30% per annum. This note argues that their estimates may be seriously...

Economies worldwide vary greatly in terms of how much their consumers spend on various types of retail activities. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the regulatory characteristics as well as the natures and strategies of businesses are related to retail spending. We employed random...

This paper empirically examines how productivity distributions of firms vary across regions based on Japan's manufacturing census data. We find that firm productivity is distributed with wide dispersions, especially in core regions. Our firm-level estimates demonstrate that the productivity...

This paper re-estimates the correlation between trade and business cycle synchronization. Different from other previous studies, we employ long-run GDP and trade data and use the GDP cross-correlation index a la Cerqueira and Martins (2009) rather than over-time cross-correlations. We find a...

This paper examines the effects of firms dynamics on industry level productivity growth in India during the period 2000-01 to 2005-06 using plant level panel data of 22 manufacturing industries. The empirical analysis is based on decomposition techniques of aggregate productivity growth. The...