As regional integration proceeds in East Asia, intermediate goods production of advanced technology has been locked in Japan despite the dispersion forces of high factor costs. However, the disastrous earthquake in 2011 may have revealed supply chain disruption risk as another dispersion force....

The standard approach to studying industrial agglomeration is to construct summary measures of the "degree of agglomeration" within each industry and to test for significant agglomeration with respect to some appropriate reference measures. But such summary measures often fail to distinguish...

Though Japan has surpassed South Korea in terms of research and development (R&D) in the area of regenerative medicine, South Korea has been more successful at commercialization. This paper focuses on the setup and operation of actual systems that consider the promotion of regenerative medicine...

The spatial structure of transport networks is subject to increasing returns in transportation, distance, and density economies. Transport costs between locations are thus, in general, endogenous, and are determined by the interaction between the spatial distribution of transport demand and...

The most straightforward policy evaluation model is the consumer surplus approach, which adopts a partial equilibrium analysis framework. Using consumer surplus, which can be measured by the area to the left of the demand curve, this framework is extremely simple yet applicable in a surprising...

Based on Japanese prefectural cross-sectional data, marriage rates and female labor force participation rates are positively correlated, while the trade-off between them has been observed with time series data. The key fact for understanding this positive correlation is that job exit rates due...

Agriculture is the focus of much contention in free trade negotiations. The Japanese government is against liberalizing the rice trade on the grounds that it would threaten "national food security" in the events of such shocks as crop failure, war, and embargo. Trade liberalization is expected...

One of the major lenders to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) is nonbank financial institutions. Unlike deposit-taking banks, nonbank financial institutions - those that do not take deposits - tend to charge high interest rates, instead of asking for collateral, in extending credit to...

In this paper, we discuss the current status and function of main bank relationships in Japan, based on the results of a survey conducted on transactions between businesses and their main banks and interviews with companies and banks. First, we surveyed transactions between 500 large Japanese...

This paper examines the firm-level pricing behavior of Japanese exports to present new evidence and determinants of an invoice currency. We interviewed twenty-three major Japanese exporting firms to collect information on their currency invoicing behavior and also on their explicit...