This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's (2001) conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher...

In this paper, the motivations of R&D by multinationals are investigated by using a large firm level dataset from Chinese official statistics on science and technology activities. Growing intensity of R&D activities is found both for foreign owned and domestic firms. But, it is also found that...

We provide an econometric analysis of whether or not the tariff preferences extended to Canada and Mexico under NAFTA may have resulted in trade diversion. A review of previous studies, both descriptive and econometric, suggests that trade diversion has occurred especially as evidenced by...

In recent years, there has been a wave of bank consolidations that has spread across the world, and bank consolidation has been one of the major issues of the research on banking and finance. This paper explores the role of government in bank consolidations, using the data on prewar Japan. The...

This paper investigates the deepening of the international division of labor and its effect on factor intensities in Japan, mainly focusing on the manufacturing sector. In the first half of the paper, we analyze the factor contents of trade and find that Japan's factor content net-exports of...

Aid for trade increases a recipient's public services, which lower its import and export transport costs. Formulating a two-country endogenous growth model, we obtain two main results. First, a permanent increase in the donor's aid/GDP ratio raises the steady-state growth rate as well as both...

Micro price data show that individual price settings are not time-invariant as presumed in the existing literature. Furthermore, the analysis of autocorrelations shows that interactions of micro prices with leads and lags ignored in the literature play a very important role in explaining the...

By using the framework of a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model, in this paper, we provide a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of exogenous shocks to Japanese output, as measured by aggregate sales, industry sales, and the sales of different firm-size groups. We analyze...

This study is an empirical attempt to compare the exporting behavior of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with large firms from the viewpoints of export market participation decision (extensive margin) and export volume decision (intensive margin), using firm-level panel data. We find...

In the policy debate over the Japanese macroeconomic performance, the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on Japan's exports has received considerable attention. However, if we take the period from the end of 2008 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers as an example, the "price shock" of the...