This paper provides an analytical description of East Asian supply chains. The data indicate that they have become more and more centered on China. In a value-added sense, though, East Asia as a whole is running surpluses against the West. The paper then surveys evidence from a variety of...

Using a unique dataset of non-listed firms that identifies the banks with which firms transact, we examine the effects of the largest-ever bank merger in Japan—that between Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (BTM) and UFJ Bank (UFJ) in 2005. We focus on how the merger affected firms through their...

Using a unique dataset of more than 140,000 manufacturing firms in Japan containing information on their suppliers and customers, this paper looks at the physical distances between transaction partners to examine the localization of transaction relationships. We find the following. First, based...

Standard micro-founded macroeconomics starts with optimization exercises to derive the precise behavior of the representative agent and regards the macroeconomy as a homothetic enlargement of a micro agent. This paper takes a different approach and presents a new micro-foundation for Keynesian...

This paper empirically examines whether the geographical proximity of transaction partners improves firms' profits by using actual microdata on inter-firm transactions. I model the formation of transaction partners between newly entering firms and existing ones as a two-sided, many-to-many...

The idea that the productivity and wages of workers are not necessarily equal has long attracted the attention of many economists. Indeed, the lack of a method to measure the productivity-wage gap has hindered the development of research on labor economics, productivity analysis, and human...

Using firm-level data on the sales and sourcing patterns of Japanese affiliates, this paper suggests that very little foreign direct investment (FDI) falls neatly into the standard bins of horizontal, vertical and export-platform FDI. Most affiliates import some intermediates and export some...

We examine the impact of cross-prefectural differences in financial integration on the regional spread of Japan's Great Recession in the early 1990s. In prefectures with many small manufacturing firms, post-1990 growth was significantly lower if low levels of banking integration with the rest of...

We examine how firms operating in three or more countries show different international spatial dependencies, compared to those operating in just two countries (home and one foreign country). In a multi-country model, we focus on the significance of rival locations abroad, which has not been...

Since adopting its economic reform policies, China has overcome various challenges and has transformed itself into a modern market economy. During this change, China has solved the problem of its five billion people living in poverty and has entered into a new development stage. However, as a...