In this paper, we investigate the causes and impacts of the recent changes in the inter-firm business relationships in the Japanese automobile industry from 1994-2010. Our main results are the following: First, we find that buyer-supplier relationships in the automobile industry in Japan have...

The issue on the growth and its variation of intra-firm trade of intermediate inputs is of great interest in international economics. This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade by shedding light not only on factor price and trade cost but also on the organizational form in terms of...

This paper examines whether overtime regulations have a significant impact on the hours worked and hourly wages, by focusing on so-called name-only managers in Japan. The term name-only manager refers to an employee who has essentially the same job description as other employees, but who is...

Firm-level data often show different modes of market access by firms with the same productivity levels, which is a mere knife-edge case in the basic firm heterogeneity model. This paper examines the foreign direct investment decisions of individual firms with a simple framework where firms and...

This paper considers whether minimum wage is a well-targeted anti-poverty policy by examining the backgrounds of minimum-wage workers, and whether raising the minimum wage reduces employment for unskilled workers. An examination of micro data from a large-scale government household survey, the...

Human resources are increasingly seen as a key to innovation competitiveness, and there is a need for detailed, systematic data on the demographics of inventors, their motivations, and their careers. To gain systematic data on who invents, we collected detailed information on a sample of...

This paper investigates the redistributional view of trade credit from the demand side, based on a unique micro data of Japanese small firms where information on transactions of intermediate goods between firms of different size is available. The redistributional hypothesis is tested in two...

Many researches that apply business cycle accounting (hereafter, BCA) to actual data conclude that models with investment frictions or investment wedges are not promising for modeling business cycle dynamics. In this paper, we apply BCA to artificial data generated by a variant model of...

This paper examines the relationships between productivity growth and characteristics of firms using Japanese firm-level data during the period 1995-2004. Applying a bootstrapped Malmquist index approach and weighted least squares (WLS) to two retail trade industries, we estimate the firm-level...

The paper examines the use of Free Trade Agreements by Japanese companies. The FTAs analyzed include Japan's FTAs with Mexico, Malaysia and Chile. Based on 1,688 responses to a questionnaire survey conducted in 2008, the study finds that the utilization rate of FTAs ranges between 32.9%...