Japan's social security expenditure has been increasing rapidly. Its ratio against the national income reached to as high as 19.6% in fiscal year 1999. The interdependency between Japan's macro-economy and her social security system is now obvious and cannot be neglected when we discuss possible...

Modern banking theories assume that banks have a specific part to play in managing some problems resulting from imperfect information on borrowers. To make their monitoring and information processing activities more efficient, banks and borrowing firms often develop long-term relationships, and...

The existing discussions about origins of the Asian crisis can be summarized into two broad views: "economic fundamentals" view and "financial panic" view. This paper attempts to distinguish these two views empirically by testing external solvency of the country using intertemporal borrowing...

This paper presents a model of economic takeoff and capital flight with free international capital flows. In the early stage of development, investments are complementary and production exhibits increasing returns to capital. The increasing returns give rise to strategic complementarity between...

1. Perspective The number of personal bankruptcy has been increasing recently in Japan. The burden of defaulted credits to Consumer Finance Companies (so called "sala-kin" in Japan) has been increasing accordingly. On the background of this trend, we can detect the following three peculiarities...

In 1820, many people thought that the development of Argentina and Chile would be as smooth as that of the United States. What went wrong? If we compare Argentina and Chile to some European countries, we can see examples of rich countries gradually receding. In 1910, the per capita GDP of...

Using industry-level data of the Japan Industrial Productivity Database (JIP Database) and firm-level data of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Basic Survey of Enterprises, we investigate the causes of the recent slowdown in Japan's total factor productivity (TFP) growth. We show...

Since the onset of the Asian crisis, what characterizes the East Asian exchange rates has been a topic of considerable discussion. In the pre-crisis period, the de facto pegs to the U.S. dollar sometimes destabilized the real "effective" exchange rates of these currencies. Several economists...

The main object of this study is to investigate how treatment patterns and patient outcomes vary among medical facilities in Japan. We take advantage of a unique survey on 3,502 patients with acute myocardial infarction treated by PTCA (Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty) in 2003....

PART I : Are Nonprofit Earnings Differentials Observed in Japan? Evidence from Micro-level Data in Japanese Nursing Homes This research is the first empirical assessment on the wage differentials between the nonprofit sector and profit sector in Japanese nursing homes, and makes use of the...