From the late 1980s, Japanese manufacturers have begun the relocation of their production sites from Japan to low-wage East Asian countries such as China and Thailand. Partly due to this plant relocation, imports of manufacturing goods from these low-wage countries in East Asia increased...

This paper explores the impact of offshoring, or contracting out of business activities to foreign providers, on firm productivity, using Japanese firm-level data for the period 1994-2000. We find that offshoring has generally a positive effect on productivity growth. This effect is robust to...

This paper examines whether privatizing Chinese state-owned enterprises increases the probability of exporting and, if so, what factors generate such an effect. Using firm-level data for the Chinese manufacturing sector for the 2000–2007 period, we find that privatization positively affects a...

"This article explores the impact of offshoring on productivity using firm-level data for the Japanese manufacturing industries during the period 1994-2000. We find that intrafirm offshoring, that is, sourcing of intermediate inputs to foreign affiliates within a particular multinational firm,...

Chinese cross-border outbound mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of firms in developed countries have been expanding rapidly since the mid-2000s. The major motives are expansion to new markets and sourcing of knowledge and strategic assets. This study is the first attempt to examine the effects of...

We examine the location choices of the foreign affiliates of Japanese manufacturing firms, using a new data set that matches parents to the affiliates they created over the 1995-2003 period. The analysis is based on new economic geography theory, and thus focuses on the effect of market and...

This paper examines how the Japanese firms’ export decision is affected by the availability of information on export markets, focusing on whether the availability of such information has a different impact on the export decision between large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises...

In the 1990s and the 2000s, the average nominal wage in Japan declined continuously. This is a sharp contrast to wage trends in other developed countries in the same period. This study seeks to provide new quantitative evidence on the possible factors contributing to the nominal wage decline in...

This paper studies the process of plant exit and productivity growth in Japan during the ‘lost decade’. A productivity decomposition shows the low rate of productivity growth at the aggregate level to be due to slow within plant productivity growth and a small contribution from the entry and...

The study group on the Creation of a Productivity Database on Japanese, Chinese, and South Korean Firms at the Japan Center for Economic Research (JCER), in conjunction with the Center for Economic Institutions (CEI) of Hitotsubashi University, the Center for China and Asian Studies (CCAS) of...