Investigates an economic barrier for foreign affiliates in Japan, the high cost of local labour: to attract qualified workers, foreign affiliates must pay a basic wage premium and offer fewer hours of work over their Japanese counterparts, a factor which reduces cost flexibility and impairs...

Argues that the high job mobility observed most prominently among workers in Japanese firms is consistent with the behaviour of risk‐averse individuals when neither private nor public income insurance is widely available to displaced workers. Laissez faire is suboptimal and involves higher job...

As automation spreads around the world, there is a broad spectrum of scenarios regarding the changes it brings in the productive forces and relations of an economy. Some of these scenarios are driven by the futurists' imagination while others are tugged behind the pragmatists' reasoning of real...