This paper examines <i>US-COOL</i>, which is the third, landmark Appellate Body's ruling under the Word Trade Organization (WTO)'s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (hereinafter "TBT Agreement") and came out in 2012.The case addressed two key obligations of the TBT Agreement (i.e., Articles 2.1...

Rapid economic development in emerging economies including China has been transforming the structure of the world economy. One such phenomenon is an international struggle for resources, in which resource-endowed countries tend to resort to export restraints of resources as one of their tools....

In treaty-based investment arbitration, tribunals quite often render their awards referring to the protection of the investor's legitimate expectations. A number of tribunals deal with this issue in the context of the application of the fair and equitable treatment clause and argue that the...

Japanese labor and employment law is based on the "command-and-control" model in which the government sets uniform minimum labor standards and enforces them through penalties and administrative inspections while leaving the determination of above-the-standard working conditions to employers,...

Research in psychology and neuroscience has shown that negative emotions such as depression and anxiety affect decision making in such a way that these emotions lead to pessimistic risk estimates. To see if this is applicable to consumer confidence, we conducted preliminary experiments. In the...

There has recently been increasing attention paid to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a treatment for depression, despite its limitations such as a shortage of therapists. Therefore, computerized-CBT (CCBT) was developed to overcome this issue. Within our meta-analysis of adult depression...

This paper examines the determinants of individuals' preferences of trade policies, using micro data on the policy preferences of 10,000 individuals in Japan. Particularly, we focus on the effect of regional factors on trade policy preferences, considering the fact that there is a significant...

Recent developments in empirical studies have shown that an increase in minimum wages has a non-negative overall employment effect, which is inconsistent with the prediction generated by the textbook competitive labor market model. This paper examines the mechanism that explicitly explains this...

We analyze the provision of repair services (aftermarket services that are required for a certain fraction of durable units after sales) through an international duopoly model in which a domestic firm and a foreign firm compete in the domestic market. Trade liberalization in goods, if not...

Using the framework of structural vector autoregressions (VAR), this paper provides a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of exogenous shocks to Japanese output as measured by aggregate sales, industry sales, and the sales of different firm size groups. We assume four structural...