This paper reviews a decade of implementation of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) program in Japan, which is now experiencing unprecedented pressure from its rapidly aging population. This overview of the program's features focuses on the incentive mechanisms and diversity, and...

Using micro data from the 2007 Employment Status Survey, this paper analyzes the relationship between postgraduate education and labor market outcomes in Japan. According to the analysis, 1) the employment-population rates of females and elderly people with postgraduate education are higher than...

This paper examines the impact of the 1995 Kobe earthquake on the survival of manufacturing plants and their post-earthquake economic performance. The evidence from macroeconomic studies of the impact of natural disasters on economic growth is mixed with some papers finding a small negative...

Economic activities in the service sector have been increasingly important in developed countries. Despite the importance of the service sector, there are several drawbacks with a conventional way of measuring service sector productivity. This paper proposes an alternative methodology in which...

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...

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...