This paper comprises three sections. First, it examines whether or not and how banks use non-quantitative data on borrowers, such as the management skills and personality of owners of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), when making lending decisions. Second, it explores the possibility of...

Monetary policy in most major economies has traditionally focused on control of the interbank interest rate to achieve an inflation target. Monetary policy in transition economies, in contrast, relied on a mixed system of price-based and quantity based instruments and targets. Japanese monetary...

This paper discusses factors that relate to the age of valid standards. Unlike patents and copyrights, standards are created without a fixed effective time set by law. A linked dataset is first prepared by connecting the technology categories of the Japanese Industrial Standards—the de jure...

This study investigates the effect of a negative demand shock on the composition of the type of workers at firms, focusing on the change in the share of temporary agency in all workers. To clearly identify the causal link between the demand a firm faces and the composition of its workforce in...

The concept of "exorbitant privilege" has received great attention from policy makers as well as academics worldwide. The idea originally referred to the willingness of foreigners to hold large quantities of US government debt at extremely low interest rates, due to the dollar's world reserve...

Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) show that differences in management practices are correlated with productivity differences at the firm level. In this paper, we conducted similar interview surveys on management practices in Japanese and Korean firms in 2008 and 2012. We find that overall management...

This paper examines the extent to which a firm's management practices are valued in the marketplace using the interview survey data which are comparable with that in Bloom and Van Reenen (2007). Kawakami and Asaba (2013) use the same interview data and find that among various management...

Using parent-foreign affiliate matched data on Japan from 1995 to 2009, this paper examines the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic employment, especially in manufacturing. One of the contributions of this paper is that we utilize the matched data for each country in which...

We developed a competitive search model involving multiple regions, geographically mobile workers, and moving costs. Equilibrium mobility patterns were analyzed and characterized, and the results indicate that shocks to a particular region, such as a productivity shock, can propagate to other...

China's surplus in processing trade remains large. Processed exports are final goods produced using parts and components that are imported duty free. Since much of the value added of these exports comes from East Asia, exchange rates throughout the region should affect their foreign currency...