This paper examines the hypothesis that manufacturing industries in Japan that have been exposed to import competition from China experience greater skill upgrading by increasing demand for skilled workers. Using an industry panel dataset over the period 1980–2010, we exploit variations of...

This paper compares the wage structure between the public and private sectors in Japan by using a large microdata set covering public and private sector employees. Rather than comparing overall wage levels, we examine the differences in relative wages by gender, age, education, and region....

The Australia-United States free trade agreement (AUSFTA) came into effect in 2005. It was the second preferential trade agreement that Australia signed, after its agreement with Singapore, and marked a departure from the primacy of Australia's previous trade policy of unilateral and...

This paper, using Japanese firm-level data, presents findings about innovative activities in the service sector and the role of patents and trade secrets on innovation. According to the analysis, first, service firms have fewer product innovations than do manufacturing firms, but the...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the presence and the number of female and foreign directors among Japanese companies. First, listed and long-established companies, subsidiaries, and unionized companies tend not to have female directors. On the other hand, owner-managed companies are...

The policy package known as Abenomics appears to have influenced the Japanese economy drastically, in particular, in the financial markets. In this paper, focusing on the aggressive monetary easing of Abenomics, the first arrow, we evaluate its role in guiding public perceptions on monetary...

This paper examines the agglomeration effects of multinational firms on the location decisions of first-time Japanese manufacturing investors in China for the period 1995–2007. This is accomplished by exploiting newly constructed measures of inter-firm backward and forward linkages formed in a...

Do financial frictions call for policy cooperation? This paper investigates the implications of financial frictions for monetary policy in the open economy. Welfare analysis shows that there are long-run gains which result from cooperation, but, dynamically, financial frictions per se do not...

The Japanese higher education sector has seen increases in tuition with stagnant household incomes in a society where family support for university students has been the norm. Student loans from government have grown rapidly to sustain the gradual increase in university enrolments. These...

This paper investigates asymmetric increasing trends in dependence in major international equity markets. To this end, we develop a multiple-regime smooth-transition copula GARCH model and address several important questions, including the number of regimes and the existence of increasing...