Japan's mid 19th century transition from 200 years of self-imposed autarky to open trade is the main success story of East Asian integration into the world economy during the first wave of globalization (1850-1914). This article reviews the economic, institutional and normative changes within...

The centre of economic activities in Japan was once in western Japan. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, economic activities within Japan have been continuously shifting towards the east side of the country including Tokyo. Conventional wisdom associates the end of the Tokugawa feudal...

Chao and Yu (2002) study immigration impact in a host country in the presence of imperfect competition. In their two sector model, when the monopolized non-traded service sector is skilled labor intensive, skilled labor immigration improves the welfare of the host country residents but unskilled...

We construct a generalized model of finite change whereby exogenous shocks such as international trade or technological change, not only contract, but totally shut down production in some sectors. In such cases even in a competitive structure and in absolute contrast to the conventional wisdom,...

We study the implication of credit constraints for the sustainability of product market collusion in a bank financed Cournot duopoly when firms face an imperfect credit market. We consider two situations without or with credit rationing. When there is no credit rationing moderately higher cost...

We investigate how individual workers and local labour markets adjust over a long time period to a discrete and plausibly exogenous technological shock, namely the introduction of containerisation in the UK port industry. This technology, which was introduced rapidly between the mid-1960s and...

We use a simple non-parametric regression approach to measure the relationship between employment growth, hirings and separations in a large panel of German establishments over the period 1993--2009. Although it is often claimed that firms in Europe have less flexibility in their ability to hire...

What determines the currency denomination of international trade? This is the first paper to consider in theory and data how exporters' dependence on imported inputs affects their choice of invoicing currency. My model predicts that exporters more dependent on foreign currency-denominated inputs...

This paper provides evidence that the reduction in bound MFN tariffs is significantly larger for products with initially high tariff levels. These findings highlight the sensitivity of the PTA-external tariff question to the inclusion of initial tariffs, putting into perspective the previously...