Employing massive contract- and firm-level data provided by the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Unit of the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC), one of the largest government lending institutions for SMEs, and linking the data with other firm-level data from a business credit information company,...

This study empirically investigates the effect of foreign ownership on research and development (R&D) investment based on firm-level panel dataset for the period 2000-2008 taken from the <i>Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities</i>. The results reveal the following. First, the...

This study replicates a model of Aghion et al. ("Competition and Innovation: An inverted-u relationship," <i>Quarterly Journal of Economics</i> 2005; 120(2):701-728), which suggests that an inverted-U relationship exists between competition and innovation. We apply patent data and a competition measure...

How a firm grows is one of the important themes in industrial organization literature. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that the distribution of firms' growth rates is not Gaussian as predicted by the celebrated Gibrat's law (Gibrat, 1931), but rather is quite well fitted by the...

The policy package known as Abenomics appears to have influenced the Japanese economy drastically, in particular, in the financial markets. In this paper, focusing on the aggressive monetary easing of Abenomics, the first arrow, we evaluate its role in guiding public perceptions on monetary...

This study examines retirement decisions in Japan, using the option value (OV) model proposed by Stock and Wise (1990) and examined by subsequent studies. This model assumes that individuals maximize a weighted average of utility from their labor income until retirement as well as that from...

In this paper, we investigate the volatility of sales at the firm and the aggregate level using the longitudinal dataset of the <i>Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations</i> (FSSC). The main findings are as follows: (1) Firm-level volatility decreased until the mid-1990s but then increased...

Germany's nominal exchange rate has remained weaker because it is linked to weaker eurozone economies. Germany's real exchange rate also depreciated vis-à-vis eurozone countries after 2000 because German firms and workers controlled unit labor costs. This paper investigates how exchange rate...

Since its enactment in 1974 until its easing in the 1990s, the Large-Scale Retail Store Law (<i>Daikibo Kouri Tenpo Ho</i>) strictly regulated the entry of large-scale retailers in cities in Japan to protect local small and medium incumbent stores. This paper investigates the effect of large-scale...

There have been very few World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement cases based on the Agreement of the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement). While the rulings of the <i>European Communities-Measures Affecting Asbestos and Products Containing Asbestos</i> and <i>European Communities-Trade...</i>