Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic stimulus package, Abenomics, depreciated the yen sharply from the end of 2012, which was expected to have a positive impact on Japan's trade balance. Contrary to the J-curve effect, however, Japan's trade balance has not shown any signs of improvement, even...

Given the recent theoretical emphasis on firm-level heterogeneity in international trade, we examine the price-setting behaviors of Japanese automobile exporting firms as they correspond with the fluctuations of foreign exchange rates. We do so by employing international trade datasets...

Why does the fraction of firms that export vary with countries' comparative advantage? To address this question, I develop a general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade in which both institutional quality and firm heterogeneity play a key role in determining international trade...

Aid for trade increases a recipient's public services, which lower its import and export transport costs. Formulating a two-country endogenous growth model, we obtain two main results. First, a permanent increase in the donor's aid/GDP ratio raises the steady-state growth rate as well as both...

Micro price data show that individual price settings are not time-invariant as presumed in the existing literature. Furthermore, the analysis of autocorrelations shows that interactions of micro prices with leads and lags ignored in the literature play a very important role in explaining the...

By using the framework of a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model, in this paper, we provide a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of exogenous shocks to Japanese output, as measured by aggregate sales, industry sales, and the sales of different firm-size groups. We analyze...

This study is an empirical attempt to compare the exporting behavior of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with large firms from the viewpoints of export market participation decision (extensive margin) and export volume decision (intensive margin), using firm-level panel data. We find...

In the policy debate over the Japanese macroeconomic performance, the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on Japan's exports has received considerable attention. However, if we take the period from the end of 2008 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers as an example, the "price shock" of the...

The employer learning model postulates that employers form employees' prior ability distribution from educational credentials and update its distribution by observing workers' performance on the job. This paper estimates the employer learning model for university-graduate white-collar workers...

Studies on the globalization of firm activities have been progressing rapidly, but empirical studies on service trade using firm-level data have been scarce. This paper, using panel data from Japanese firms, analyzes the relationship between service trade and firm characteristics such as...