Recent studies have established that the Japanese stock market had a substantial size in the pre-war period, and played an important role in financing economic development. The pre-war stock market in Japan, however, did not achieve its size and status quickly. Indeed, the market capitalization...

Until early 1960's, the Japanese government controlled import by means of foreign exchange allocation system. Rents generated and allocated by the foreign exchange allocation system provided the government with a powerful tool for industrial policy, although there also existed a possibility that...

In this paper I applied the ideas of evolutionary biology and evolutionary ecology to the empirical analysis on the development of the institutions in postwar Japan. The basic question is how selection and imitation have worked in the evolution of the economic institutions in Japan. I focused on...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the degree of government intervention in the allocation of private bank funds in 1950's Japan. As a part of the transition process to a market economy, financial controls dating since the period of WWII, were abolished in 1949. By the early 1950's, the...

In this paper we analyze the government organization and industrial policies in postwar Japan from comparative institutional perspectives. Industrial policies were drawn up and implemented under different fundamental and organizational environments from period to period. Before the Japanese...

In this paper we examine performance of fiscal policy from a historical standpoint. Before WWII, government expenditure was not a stabilizing factor, but its volatile fluctuation caused instability of the Japanese economy. Especially before WWI, sporadic sharp increase of government expenditure...

We explore how changes in ownership and managerial control affect the productivity and profitability of producers. Using detailed operational, financial, and ownership data from the Japanese cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last century, we find a more nuanced picture than the...

After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Japan annexed Korea in 1910. We exploit this event as a natural experiment to investigate the effect of improved market access on the population growth. It is found that the tariff reduction raised the growth rate of population, and...