Many observational studies of micro and small enterprises have found that enterprise performance and education levels of entrepreneurs are positively associated. Does it follow that entrepreneurs’ management capacities depend on their academic achievements? This paper examines what types of...

Poor management has long been suspected as a major constraint on job creation in the manufacturing sector in low-income countries. In this sector, numerous micro and small enterprises in industrial clusters account for a large share of employment. This paper examines the roles of industrial...

After the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear accident, nuclear power stations cannot be considered safe any longer and, thus, can be hardly allowed to restart in Japan. In this study, we develop a nine-region spatial equilibrium model for the Japanese power market and...

By using a unique cross-sectional dataset of Chinese industrial firms, this paper investigates the external and internal effects of human capital on firms’ environmental performance. The result shows that firms have better environmental compliance because they are ‘pushed’ into making...

In the conventional social productive efficiency measurement, a DEA-based non-parametric method is typically employed to identify the piece-wise-linear production possibility frontier. Applying the directional distance-function approach a-la Luenberger (1992) to the production possibility...

Whether universal preschool education can eliminate the achievement gap among children in the long term has been debated in the United States and elsewhere. This paper offers new evidence from the experience of massive preschool education expansion in Japan. Using prefecture-level panel data, we...

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station held by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had a serious nuclear accident in March of 2011. TEPCO's liability for the losses caused by this accident is speculated to reach several trillion yen. For this compensation, TEPCO is supposed to sell its...

This paper examines the movement of an individuals reservation level over time in a two-sided search model with two-sided imperfect self-knowledge, where agents are vertically heterogeneous and do not know their own types. Agents who do not know their own types update their beliefs about their...

Observed spatial wage disparities reflect not only disparities in regional productivity but also an uneven geographical distribution of heterogeneous worker skills. We measure spatial skill disparities in Japan and evaluate how migration contributes to these disparities. For this purpose, we...

This paper investigates the impact of training provided by a large-scale private farm on the performance of surrounding small-scale rice farmers in a rain-fed area in Tanzania. We found that the training effectively enhances the adoption of improved rice cultivation practices, paddy yield, and...