Japan's successful industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century largely exhausted its then abundant natural resources. Rather than exemplifying rapid development in the absence of natural resources, Japan shows how laissez-faire government and successfully transplanted classical...

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan argues that economic development requires coordinated investment in many interdependent industries, and prescribes a flood of state-controlled investment across all sectors-a so-called big push. Widespread government failure defeated twentieth-century big push schemes. But...

Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' - the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided this...

Japan's corporate sector has, at different times in recent history, been organized according to every major model. Prior to World War II, wealth Japanese families locked in their control over large corporations by organizing them into pyramidal groups, called zaibatsu, similar to structures...

Japan's prolonged economic problems are due to more than faulty macro-economic policies. We do not deny the importance of bungled macro-economic policy, but argue that deeper maladies in Japanese corporate governance made that country increasingly vulnerable to such problems. We argue that...

We study the relation between firms? banking relations, ownership structures, and q ratios in Japan. At low levels of equity ownership by main banks, firms? q ratios fall as bank equity ownership rises. At higher levels of bank equity ownership, this relationship is mitigated and, in some...

Using a large sample of Japanese firm level data, we find that Japanese banks act primarily in the short term interests of creditors when dealing with firms outside bank groups. Corporate control mechanisms other than bank oversight appear necessary in these firms. When dealing with firms in...

We investigate the relation between firms' ownership structures and q ratios in Japan. At low levels of ownership by main banks, firms' q ratios fall as bank equity ownership rises. At higher levels of bank ownership, this relationship is mitigated and, in some specifications, even reversed. We...

Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' -- the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided...

Many firms generate large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases when they burn fossil fuels in their production processes. In addition, production of raw materials and other inputs the firms procure for their operations also generates greenhouse gases indirectly. These direct and...