Recent developments in empirical studies have shown that an increase in minimum wages has a non-negative overall employment effect, which is inconsistent with the prediction generated by the textbook competitive labor market model. This paper examines the mechanism that explicitly explains this...

We analyze the provision of repair services (aftermarket services that are required for a certain fraction of durable units after sales) through an international duopoly model in which a domestic firm and a foreign firm compete in the domestic market. Trade liberalization in goods, if not...

Using the framework of structural vector autoregressions (VAR), this paper provides 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 assume four structural...

In the policy debate over Japanese macroeconomic performance, the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on Japan's exports has received enormous 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 yen's...

This paper examines the effect of the structure of supply chain networks on productivity and innovation capability through knowledge diffusion, using large firm-level panel data for Japan. We find that ties with distant suppliers improve productivity, as measured by sales per worker, possibly...

In this study, we aim at quantifying the permanent socio-economic impacts of the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake in 1995. We employ a large scale panel data of 1,719 wards (shi, ku, cho, son) from Japan over almost three decades. In order to overcome a fundamental difficulty of obtaining a...

This study constructs a monthly series of industry-specific real effective exchange rates (I-REERs) based on the producer price indices of nine Asian economies from 2001 to 2014. To check the usefulness of the I-REERs as a measurement of international price competitiveness, we calculated the...

Recently, many small and medium enterprises in the Japanese food manufacturing industry have expanded their business overseas through export. In this study, we explore the determinants of exporting activity at the plant-level, paying particular attention to product price and quality as well as...

Using Japanese municipal dataset between 1980 and 2010, this paper empirically analyzes the underlying mechanism of interregional labor migration. Since the existing literature shows that regional disparities in unemployment rates have decreased gradually, our main concern is to uncover how the...

The Federal Reserve Board (FRB) of the United States has decided to end its quantitative easing monetary policy as the global financial crisis is subsiding there. It is expected that it will raise the federal funds (FF) rate from almost zero in the near future. Large amounts of money which...