Contradicting the conventional wisdom of constant factor shares, the portion of national income accruing to labor has been trending downward in the last three decades. This decline must have contributed to rising inequality as labor income is more evenly distributed than capital income. This...

Utilizing firm-level data covering the 2010-2015 period, this study documents the frequency and characteristics of multi-product firms in Vietnamese manufacturing. Our major findings are as follows. First, multi-product firms are larger, more capital-intensive, more productive, and are more...

This paper examines the surge of imports from the PRC to Viet Nam from 2000 to 2014 in order to evaluate the effects of increased exposure to trade with the PRC on income inequality and household welfare in Viet Nam. Using household level data from the Viet Nam Household Living Standard Survey...

Financial literacy is gaining increasing importance as a policy objective in many countries. However, internationally comparable information on financial literacy is still scarce. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development International Network on Financial Education (OECD/INFE)...

Using a decomposition approach on data collected by the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) as well as World Input-Output data, we show that in most Asian economies the services sector makes the largest contribution to labor productivity. Furthermore, we find evidence of a major reallocation...

Financial literacy is gaining increasing importance as a policy objective in many countries. A growing literature has examined the role of financial literacy in an individual's income, saving behavior and the use of various financial products. However, so far, no one has examined the...

The COVID-19 vaccines played a pivotal role in safeguarding populations. Yet, vaccine hesitancy remained a significant barrier to increasing coverage rates, as many high-income countries faced prolonged vaccine refusal campaigns. In Japan, vaccine doses were administered under a reservation...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

Following a major earthquake off the Pacific coast of Japan, a tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three reactors in Fukushima, causing a major nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. Based on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach we use panel data for 5,979 individuals...

We use a large household panel for Japan (Keio Household Panel Survey) to estimate household-size economies in energy consumption. The household-size economies we obtain are significant and sizable: the per-capita energy-related spending of a two-adult household is only about two-thirds of the...