This paper empirically examines the role of imports in the assessment of domesticmergers. It constructs and estimates a structural model of demand and supply todescribe Japan’s copper tube, taking an explicit account of cross-border transactions.Obtained simulation results show that the merger...

Markup, or the ratio of price to cost, depends on the firm's attributes and the market environment where the firm operates. This paper empirically studies the relationship between the markups of firms and their firm-to-firm transactional status. More specifically, we analyze the correlation...

This paper analyzes how a firm’s markup correlates to its suppliers’ markups. Our research targeted more than 40,000 Japanese firms during 2001-16. The dataset is based on the Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities, provided by METI, and supplemented by data from...

Models of vintage-capital learning by doing predict an initial fall in productivity after the introduction of new technology. This paper examines the impact of new technology on plant-level productivity in the Japanese steel industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The introduction of the basic oxygen...

This paper estimates a dynamic oligopoly model to assess the economic consequences of a horizontal merger that took place in 1970 to create the second largest global producer of steel. The paper solves a Markov perfect Nash equilibrium for the model and simulates the welfare effects of the...

This paper examines the economic impact of re-invention -- the degree to which an innovation is modified by user -- on industry growth and productivity. The paper focuses on two re-inventions made by a Japanese steel company; these inventions improved the productive efficiency of Austrian-made...

This paper examines intra-plant diffusion of new technology in the Japanese steel industry. The introduction of the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) was the greatest breakthrough in steel refining in the last century. Using unique panel data, the paper estimates total factor productivity by technology...