While the Japanese economy has been characterized by historically low interest rates, in the euro area, the sovereign debt crisis has occurred due to the high risk premium required by investors. Recently, the bill related to the Comprehensive Reform of Social Security and Tax, which includes the...

This paper proposes one measure for the productivity of banks and studies how it affects the sensitivity of a client firm's capital investment with respect to investment opportunity. As a direct measure for the productivity of banks, we employ the risk-adjusted profit of an individual bank,...

This paper examines how firms' decision to start exporting is affected by the availability of information on export markets. Unlike existing studies which focus on information sharing among firms, we examine the information provided by firms' top lender banks (main banks). Specifically, using a...

This paper empirically studies the impact of banks' efficiency on their client firms' export behavior. Our empirical analysis shows that the marginal impact of the total factor productivity (TFP) of cash-flow constrained firms to the extensive margin of exports increases as the efficiency of top...

This paper examines how firms’ decision to start exporting is affected by the availability of information on export markets. Unlike existing studies which focus on information sharing among firms, we are interested in the information provided by firms’ main bank. Specifically, using a unique...

This paper studies the quantitative impact of the efficiency of lender banks on their client firms' total factor productivity. By using the panel data for bank and firm characteristics including the efficiency of banks, we empirically establish the positive correlation between the growth and the...

This paper examines how firm practices that could contribute to worker attainment of work-life balance (WLB) affect the total factor productivity (TFP) of a firm, by using panel data of Japanese firms from the 1990s. We observed a positive correlation between the WLB practices and TFP among...

We examine the impact of the strength of host countries' university research and university-industry collaboration on the propensity of Japanese multinational firms to conduct research and development (R&D) activities in these countries. We consider heterogeneous effects based on the type of R&D...

This paper investigates how the Asian Monetary Unit (AMU) Deviation Indicators for surveillance measurements among East Asian currencies are improved by changing their benchmark rates from the constant rates in 2000-2001 to time-varying rates based on their purchasing power parities (PPPs). The...

The standard approach to studying industrial agglomeration is to construct summary measures of the "degree of agglomeration" within each industry and to test for significant agglomeration with respect to some appropriate reference measures. But such summary measures often fail to distinguish...