Asia-Pacific countries are currently negotiating two mega-regional free trade agreements (FTAs), namely Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, by using a dynamic applied general equilibrium model...

We analyze equilibrium wage contracts in a competitive search model where a firm motivates workers to invest in a match-specific skill. If skill is not critical for production, the contract is first best. If critical, the contract coincides with an efficiency wage contract and cannot attain even...

The Great East Japan Earthquake left the unprecedented damage widely on the north-east prefectures in Japan. There were innumerable nonprofit organizations held the voluntary emergency relief activities in the damaged areas. To aid the victims, magnificent giving was donated from all over the...

This paper investigates whether labor substitution between age groups has become higher in the 2000s. I update Noro and Ohtake (2006) which uses the Basic Survey on Wage Structure in Japan and estimates elasticity of substitution between employees in three age groups before 2001. They employ a...

This article provides an empirical investigation of the impact of immigration on native Japanese youth unemployment. The Japanese Population Censuses from 1990 through 2010, occurring once every 5 years, provide the data for analysis. From the raw census numbers, I created a panel data set for...

We examine the role of financial shocks in business cycles in general and in financial crises in particular in East Asia (Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand) since the 1990s. Estimating a Financial Conditions Index, we found that financial shocks explain most of business downturns in all...

Using census data from 2000-2011, we examined the survival of multinational enterprises (MNEs) located in Vietnam using Cox hazard models with time-variant covariates. Beside enterprises' characteristics and performance, we found that the firm characteristics, structure of the ownership and...

In this paper we compare welfare effects and the extent of sectoral adjustments under the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) accords using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model from the perspective of...

This paper examines the labor supply outcomes of family care provision for Japanese households in 2010, ten years after the introduction of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) program. We found that family care provision for parents adversely affected labor market outcomes of main...

This paper tries to verify how the establishment of investment promotion agencies (IPAs) affects the decisions of foreign firms regarding their subsequent investment by combining firm-level data from the World Bankfs Enterprise Survey with city-level information on (IPAs) in China. After...