Japan is the leading supplier of sophisticated capital goods to East Asian countries. These goods embody advanced technologies and facilitate learning and productivity growth. Capital goods also represent 30%-40% of Japan's exports. This paper investigates the determinants of these exports....

In this paper, we investigate why information and communication technology (ICT) investment in Japan has stagnated since the 1990s. Given that a notable characteristic of Japan's economy is that small as well as older firms play a much greater role than in other economies, particularly that of...

This paper aims to explain why housing investment in Japan stagnated in the 2000s. Housing investment consists of two parts: replacement and a net increase of housing stock, which can be further decomposed into changes in the number of households and the housing utilization rate. Using the...

The gap between marginal revenues and marginal costs of inputs (i.e., distortions or wedges) at establishments potentially lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) by preventing efficient allocation of resources among incumbents, deterring entry and exit, and affecting technology choices....

This paper addresses the economic impacts of free trade agreements (FTAs) on the location choice of Japanese services suppliers. It makes a first-step analysis on the impact of Japan's bilateral FTAs on the Mode 3 (commercial presence)-based trade in services, as there seems to be no detailed...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of patent thickets. One unique feature of our study is to identify two sources of patent thickets: (1) complementarity as measured by the number of the patents to be used jointly with the focal patent in commercialization, and (2) ownership...

In this paper, we analyze the implications of demographic change, i.e., the aging of society, on the direction of technological change and the rate of economic growth.Taking demographic change as an exogenous event, the simple variant of Acemoglu's theory of directed technical change implies...

To utilize the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) for crisis management, macroeconomic surveillance of the member economies should be ex-ante conditionality. Hence, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus Three Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) was established to...

In this study, we construct an interregional trade model that includes endogenous fertility rates. The presented model shows that the agglomeration of manufacturing firms in a large region causes fertility rates to become lower than that in a small region. The agglomeration of firms in a region...

In a country such as China, which maintains strict controls on foreign exchange and frequently intervenes in the currency market, it is not surprising that the local currency is persistently undervalued in nominal terms. Normally, one would expect such a policy of deliberate currency...