How did post-War newer democracies, whose governments faced both pressures from vested special interests and vo ters, achieve trade liberalization ? Exploiting the case of trade liberalization in 1960s Japan, this paper addresses this question. Because the benefits and costs of...

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese coal industry experienced huge fluctuations in production and labor productivity. In this paper, I explore the micro-aspects of labor productivity change in the coal industry during World War II, using mine-level data, compiled from official statistics and...

In pre-war Japan, many banks were controlled by industrial companies through capital and personal relationships. Those banks are known as "organ banks" (kikan ginko). Organ banks engaged in unsound lending to their related companies, which resulted in damage to the banks' financial positions and...

The central bank as the Lender of Last Resort (LLR) is faced with a trade off between the stability of the financial system and the moral hazard of banks. In this paper we explore how this trade off was dealt with by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in the pre-war period, and how LLR lending by the BOJ...

This paper explores the flow of fund around the holding company (headquarters) of Mitsubishi Zaibatsu during the Second World War. From the late 1930s, the Mitsubishi holding company started to raise fund from the outside capital market through selling the shares of its affiliated companies, and...

This paper overviews the industrial organization in Japan in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Using comprehensive plant-level data, I made clear the market structure of the manufacturing industry in 1902. It was found that the level of market concentration in Japan was...

Long-term economic plans were one of the major issues of the economic policy in Japan from the late 1930s to the 1950s. In this paper, we focus on three long-term economic plans in this period, namely the Production Capacity Expansion Plan in 1939 and 1942, the Economic Reconstruction Plan in...

This paper explores the change in the security portfolio of the holding company of Mitsubishi Zaibatsu (Mitsubishi Partnership) and its implication on the profitability of that company. First we confirmed that Mitsubishi Partnership substantially altered the portfolio from 1925 to 1935,...