With the recent difficult regional economy, the concept called "Social Capital" has been drawing attention as a factor to revitalize regions. "Social Capital", according to Putnam (1993), is defined as the "features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate...

During the last decade, economists and policy makers have extensively discussed what types of firms can exploit external markets by exporting and what happens to domestic firms if external competitors penetrate into the home market. Although both theoretical and empirical studies have been...

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect on female employment of labor market deregulation by using the 1985 amendments to the Labor Standards Law (LSL) in Japan as a natural experiment. The original LSL of 1947 prohibited women from working overtime exceeding two hours a day; six...

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 study analyses the difference in the probability of success in starting a business between male and female entrepreneurs. The novel data set of the participants of business start-up seminars enables us to control for entrepreneurial drive, educational level and managerial experience. In...

The theory of employee discrimination gives a possible explanation for the scarcity of female executive officers. This paper tests the employee discrimination hypothesis by measuring the wage premium received by employees working with female executives against their tastes for discrimination....

This paper proposes a new empirical method to measure the gap between wage and productivity of workers. Our method aggregates Mincer-type human capital function of all workers of a firm and obtains the total labor input. We put it into the Cobb-Douglas production function and estimate the...

Using the personnel and transaction data from a large auto dealership in Japan, this paper discusses the value, incentives, assignments, determinants of performance, and learning of managers. We find that: (1) moving one standard deviation up the distribution of manager fixed effects raises a...

Subjective performance evaluation serves as a double-edged sword. While it can mitigate multitasking agency problems, it also opens the door to evaluators' biases, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of worker quits. Using the personnel records of individual sales...

Subjective performance evaluation serves as a double-edged sword. While it can mitigate multitasking agency problems, it also opens the door to evaluators’ biases, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of worker quits. Using the personnel and transaction records of individual...