Using Japanese municipal dataset between 1980 and 2010, this paper empirically analyzes the underlying mechanism of interregional labor migration. Since the existing literature shows that regional disparities in unemployment rates have decreased gradually, our main concern is to uncover how the...

The Federal Reserve Board (FRB) of the United States has decided to end its quantitative easing monetary policy as the global financial crisis is subsiding there. It is expected that it will raise the federal funds (FF) rate from almost zero in the near future. Large amounts of money which...

This paper derives a new monthly index of real economic activity for Japan for the period 1960 to 2013. The index shows a similar behavior to that of the real gross domestic product (GDP). The correlation coefficient based on annual data and quarterly data is 0.94 and 0.90, respectively....

This paper attempts to estimate the quarterly equilibrium exchange rates (EER) of nine Asian currencies (Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines) with the Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rates (BEER) from 2006 to 2014. The BEER was compared with...

Under a declining population, the engine for economic growth is regarded as broadly defined technical progress or innovation. We demonstrate that the production of goods always follows logistic growth. This simple fact results from the saturation of demand for any existing goods and services....

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) articles I, III, XX all provide for the principle of non-discrimination (Most-favored nation treatment (MFN) and national treatment) which forms the foundation of the WTO law aquis, and a series of quisi judicial adjudications have attempted to...

By merging two newly created databases for the analysis of prefecture-level productivity—the R-JIP Database 2013 and the R-LTES Database 2013—with other regional statistics, we examine how and why "aged prefectures" differ from other prefectures. Our main findings can be summarized as...

Chinese exports dramatically increased in the early 2000s as China reformed its economy to become more free and open via its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which clearly affected the productivity and exports of Chinese firms. This paper, using firm-level panel data from the...

Because corporate diversification and organization co-evolve, diversification discounts, which are widely reported in the literature, can be caused by organizational structure, rather than by the industrial scope of the firm. The paper examines this possibility based on a large sample of...

Either quality sorting or the presence of a specific cost (the so-called Alchian-Allen effect) is considered to be the main mechanism for the positive relationship between product quality and the distance to market. However, the reduced-form regressions found in the literature generally fail to...