This study presents evidence for the existence of job polarization in Japan, identifies its effects across four age cohorts, and shows its relationship to Japan's business cycles during 1984-2010. The findings indicate that middle-skilled occupations decreased most sharply among the youngest...

We offer a general framework to study procurement auctions when quality matters. In this environment, sellers compete for a project by bidding a price-quality pair, and the winning bidder is determined by the score assigned to each bid. In contrast to the existing study in which only the...

This paper shows that income convergence in an open-economy setting hinges upon how the time-discount rate of the households is determined. As opposed to the case of constant time-discount rate where cross-country income divergence may emerge, the small-open economy may catch up with the rest of...

This study explores the effects of remittances on child education that depend on three types of migration: parental, non-parental, and no migration. Measuring the effects of remittances is challenging and demands great caution because their theoretical positive impacts can be partly or fully...

Research papers in empirical finance and financial econometrics are among the most widely cited, downloaded and viewed articles in the discipline of Finance. The special issue presents several papers by leading scholars in the field on “Recent Developments in Financial Economics and...

First, we investigate which type of the liability law that protects nuclear power plants against catastrophe is socially optimal. We show that when a firm with a few funds is managed under the strict liability, maximization of social welfare is impossible since the firm may not cope with the...

We develop a macroeconomic model in which liquidity plays an essential role in the production process, because firms have a commitment problem regarding factor payments. A liquidity crisis occurs when firms fail to obtain sufficient liquidity, and may be caused either by self-fulfilling beliefs...

We study the investment timing problem where two firms that compete for investment preemption know in advance the time at which the economic condition changes. We show that the so-called Bad News Principle applies to the leader firm’s investment decision near maturity in many cases. This...

We investigate an overlapping generations model (OLG) model in which agents who live for two periods receive idiosyncratic productivity shocks when they are old. We show that a combination of lump-sum and linear capital taxes can always Pareto-improve the allocation, that is, it can raise the...