In an economic geography model with firm heterogeneity, Baldwin and Okubo (2006) show that regional policies for promoting periphery development attract low-productivity firms and adversely affect the productivity gap within a country. This paper empirically examines their theoretical prediction...

Previous studies have established that offshoring firms employ more non-production workers. By using micro-data on Japanese firms, this paper disaggregates non-production workers. The share of skilled non-production workers tends to be high in offshoring firms but that of unskilled...

This paper empirically examines how productivity distributions of firms vary across regions based on Japan's manufacturing census data. We find that firm productivity is distributed with wide dispersions, especially in core regions. Our firm-level estimates demonstrate that the productivity...

type="main" <p>Trade in tasks has been actively examined in recent trade theories, although empirical trade research has a long tradition of measuring the factor content of trade. By linking data on occupations, tasks, labour inputs and international trade, we calculate the “task content of...</p>

The paper examines seasonal productivity variations by using monthly plant-level physical output and capacity data. The regression results confirm that seasonal output elasticity is substantially larger than non-seasonal elasticity not only at the industry level, but also at the plant level. The...

This article provides empirical evidence on the product cycle and the firm's make-or-buy decision by using a firm-level data set with a direct measure of foreign outsourcing. Across industries, foreign outsourcing tends to be inactive in R&D-intensive industries. Within each industry, products...

During the period 2000-2009, offshore sourcing by Japanese firms to East Asian countries rapidly increased. Our survey on Japanese offshoring shows that 20 per cent of the Japanese companies are performing offshore sourcing and more than 50 per cent of the companies with 300 or more employees...

This paper reexamines the relationship between FDI and R&D by exploiting firm-level data for 118,300 Japanese manufacturers with no threshold. Our study confirms that the positive association between FDI and R&D is robust even if firms undertaking no FDI and/or no R&D are included. The inclusion...

This paper first of all develops a theoretical model to examine a number of heterogeneous firms' choice between making export-oriented foreign direct investments (FDI) in a host country and making FDI in another country to serve the market there. It is shown that all firms below a critical level...