This paper applies the job creation (JC)/ destruction (JD) method to the micro data of Japanese manufacturing firms and provides a bird's eye portrait of the dynamism of globalizing firms in terms of domestic employment, domestic establishments, domestic affiliates, and trade. It examines gross...

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) articles I, III, XX all provide for the principle of non-discrimination (Most-favored nation treatment (MFN) and national treatment) which forms the foundation of the WTO law aquis, and a series of quisi judicial adjudications have attempted to...

By merging two newly created databases for the analysis of prefecture-level productivity—the R-JIP Database 2013 and the R-LTES Database 2013—with other regional statistics, we examine how and why "aged prefectures" differ from other prefectures. Our main findings can be summarized as...

Chinese exports dramatically increased in the early 2000s as China reformed its economy to become more free and open via its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which clearly affected the productivity and exports of Chinese firms. This paper, using firm-level panel data from the...

Because corporate diversification and organization co-evolve, diversification discounts, which are widely reported in the literature, can be caused by organizational structure, rather than by the industrial scope of the firm. The paper examines this possibility based on a large sample of...

Either quality sorting or the presence of a specific cost (the so-called Alchian-Allen effect) is considered to be the main mechanism for the positive relationship between product quality and the distance to market. However, the reduced-form regressions found in the literature generally fail to...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic stimulus package, Abenomics, depreciated the yen sharply from the end of 2012, which was expected to have a positive impact on Japan's trade balance. Contrary to the J-curve effect, however, Japan's trade balance has not shown any signs of improvement, even...

Given the recent theoretical emphasis on firm-level heterogeneity in international trade, we examine the price-setting behaviors of Japanese automobile exporting firms as they correspond with the fluctuations of foreign exchange rates. We do so by employing international trade datasets...

Why does the fraction of firms that export vary with countries' comparative advantage? To address this question, I develop a general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade in which both institutional quality and firm heterogeneity play a key role in determining international trade...

The gap between marginal revenues and marginal costs of inputs (i.e., distortions or wedges) at establishments potentially lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) by preventing efficient allocation of resources among incumbents, deterring entry and exit, and affecting technology choices....