The cost of imperfect information is estimated in the real estate market of resale condominiums in central Tokyo by using a new, comprehensive data set of resale condominium transactions. The results suggest a substantial cost. Specifically, if information were perfectly available and marketing...

What brought the concentration of people to certain areas? And how much are households prepared to pay in exchange for being part of such concentrations? Focusing on the Tokyo metropolitan area, which is one of the world’s largest urban areas, this paper aggregates individual data relating to...

When Japan's asset bubble burst, the office vacancy rate soared sharply. This study targets the office market in Tokyo's 23 special wards during Japan's bubble burst period. It aims to define economic conditions for the redevelopment/conversion of offices into housing and estimate the...

The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism for the spatial mismatch hypothesis. Spatial mismatch can here be the result of optimizing behavior on the part of the labor market participants. In particular, the unemployed can choose low amounts of search and long-term unemployment if they...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

The spatial distribution of industries and population is quite lumpy, and this lumpiness varies across industries. Nevertheless, we show using Japanese data for metropolitan areas that the locations of both industries and population are linked by surprisingly simple and persistent patterns. In...

An empirical regularity designated as the Number-Average Size (NAS) Rule was first identified for the case of Japan by Mori, Nishikimi and Smith [71], and has since been extended to the US by Hsu [50]. This rule asserts a negative log-linear relation between the number and average population...

This paper examines the use of alternative financial service providers (AFSPs) such as check-cashing outlets and pawnshops in Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, and Allegheny counties. Also explores whether these providers are disproportionately serving minority and low-income areas.

This paper continues the use of the spatial void hypothesis methodology to analyze the location of alternative financial service providers, such as check cashing outlets and pawn shops, in New Castle County, Delaware, and Atlantic, Mercer, Monmouth, and Passaic counties in New Jersey. Also...

This working paper supersedes WP 12-22, WP 11-42, and WP 10-33. We employ a unique data set to examine the spatial clustering of private R&D labs, and, using patent citations data, we provide evidence of localized knowledge spillovers within these clusters. Jaffe, Trajtenberg, and Henderson...