This paper investigates the impact of overseas subsidiaries' R&D activities on the productivity growth of parent firms using firm-level panel data for Japanese multinational enterprises. We distinguish between overseas R&D for the utilization and acquisition of foreign advanced knowledge, or...

This paper examines asset-price bubbles in an economy where a nondepletable asset (e.g., land) can provide transaction services, using a variant of the cash-in-advance model. When a landowner can borrow money immediately using land as collateral, one can say that land essentially provides a...

This paper traces the evolution of technocracy in Indonesia, while asking how to explain the changing effectiveness of the economic team of ministers from the early Suharto era to the current era under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in the economic policy decision making. The paper argues...

Does localization of procurements, sales, and management contribute to the profitability of overseas affiliates? This study examines this question by analyzing the performance of Japanese multinationals' manufacturing affiliates in China using a comprehensive affiliate-level dataset for the...

Theoretical and empirical work suggests that commercial loan officers play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about their SME borrowers. We test whether loan officers in the Japanese SME loan market perform this role in a manner that is consistent with the...

This paper analyzes the causes of the decline in Japan's border effect by estimating gravity equations for Japan's international and interregional trade in four machinery industries (electrical, general, precision, and transportation machinery). In the estimation, we explicitly take account of...

In an attempt to explain the male-female wage differential, we estimated the relative marginal productivity and relative wage of female workers compared to those of male workers, using panel data from Japanese firms. The estimation results indicate that firms hiring 10 percentage points more...

We conduct a comprehensive examination on how relationship lenders price loans to small opaque firms using the rich matched data set of Japanese firms and their main banks. Our major findings are: 1. Neither measures for a borrower firm's transparency to the public (outsiders) nor measures for...

We conduct a two-stage game experiment with a non-excludable public good. In the first stage, two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good. In the second stage, knowing the other subject's commitment decision, subjects who...