This article provides empirical evidence on the product cycle and the firm's make-or-buy decision by using a firm-level data set with a direct measure of foreign outsourcing. Across industries, foreign outsourcing tends to be inactive in R&D-intensive industries. Within each industry, products...

The paper examines seasonal productivity variations by using monthly plant-level physical output and capacity data. The regression results confirm that seasonal output elasticity is substantially larger than non-seasonal elasticity not only at the industry level, but also at the plant level. The...

During the period 2000-2009, offshore sourcing by Japanese firms to East Asian countries rapidly increased. Our survey on Japanese offshoring shows that 20 per cent of the Japanese companies are performing offshore sourcing and more than 50 per cent of the companies with 300 or more employees...

O<sc>kubo</sc> T. and T<sc>omiura</sc> E. Skew productivity distributions and agglomeration: evidence from plant-level data, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper empirically examines how the shapes of plant productivity distributions vary across regions based on Japan's manufacturing census. It focuses on the skewness to...

type="main" <p>Trade in tasks has been actively examined in recent trade theories, although empirical trade research has a long tradition of measuring the factor content of trade. By linking data on occupations, tasks, labour inputs and international trade, we calculate the “task content of...</p>

This paper first of all develops a Cournot oligopolistic model with heterogeneous firms to examine each firm's choice between export-oriented foreign direct investments (FDI) and FDI to serve the host-country market. It is shown that there exist a critical level of efficiency such that all firms...

This paper empirically examines how the shapes of plant productivity distributions vary across regions based on Japan's manufacturing census. We focus on the skewness to examine the asymmetry by estimating the gamma distribution at the plant level. By linking the estimated shape parameters with...