Japan and the World Economy最新文献

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic plunged many industries of the economy into contraction, particularly the travel, hotel accommodation, and eating/drinking industries. In Japan, some demand-inducing policies targeting such industries were implemented, known as the Go To Travel and Go To Eat campaigns. Using a unique individual-level survey, we investigate what factors make people respond to these campaign policies. We find that certain socioeconomics factors (e.g., gender, income, ICT skills) as well as noneconomic factors matter. In particular, risk attitudes, and personal traits (e.g., extraversion) crucially affect whether people traveled or dined out in response to these campaigns despite the spread of COVID-19.

This paper offers a variant of the Ricardian model able to structurally interpret the estimate of country specific variable—transportation infrastructure. Guided by this new theoretical framework, this paper shows that transportation infrastructure enhances international trade more than internal trade. Further quantitative analysis suggests 10% increase in transportation infrastructure induces 3.9% increase in real income and more than 95% of the gains concentrate on the infrastructure improving country. This paper also suggests that transportation infrastructure improvement increases real income mostly through internal trade cost reduction. All the above results suggest that better infrastructure leads to sizable gains providing additional empirical support to policies aiming to improve transportation infrastructure.

The standard firm heterogeneity model of FDI considers the case of whole ownership of foreign affiliates. However, there exist many partially-owned foreign affiliates. This paper builds a model based on Helpman et al. (2004) to allow various ownership structures and posits some testable hypotheses on the relationship between productivity and ownership shares/structures. The empirical part corroborates these hypotheses, showing that high productivity firms tend to have a higher ownership share in their affiliates, and lower productivity firms tend to opt for joint-ventures with wholesalers and/or local/3rd country partners.

Several types of FX derivatives involve the exchange of principal, making them a form of collateralised loan. But unlike other forms of collateralised borrowing, the payment obligations associated with such derivatives are not reported on the balance sheet: they are in a very real sense “missing debt”. This introduces gaps in the compilation of countries’ and sectors’ foreign currency positions, in particular their short-term US dollar obligations and receipts. When economic shocks occur, policies designed to restore the flow of dollar liquidity outside the United States (eg central bank swap lines) are blind to the scale of dollar liquidity needs in particular locations. This paper presents evidence that the missing dollar debt of banks and non-banks outside the United States is large, roughly double the dollar debt recorded on their balance sheets. It then reviews how well benchmark statistical collections – BIS international banking statistics (IBS), BIS OTC Derivatives (OTCD) statistics, International Investment Position (IIP) statistics, and the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS)) – capture foreign currency positions, both on- and off-balance sheet, and where modifications to these statistics could help to close data gaps.

This study estimates the Gross Domestic Income (GDI) from taxation data by updating Fujiwara and Ogawa (2016, 2018). The National Account statistics in Japan derives GDI from GDP so that the national accounting identity always holds. However, from the experiences of the U.S. and Australia, where GDI is estimated independently from GDP, the identity does not hold in practice due to differences in data sources, inter alia. We find that the estimate of GDI exceeds GDP by about 20 trillion yen in 2019, which gives quite different readings of potential growth, labor share, household saving ratio, and saving-investment balance of both households and non-financial corporations in recent years. The present study likewise demonstrates how to combine the information of GDE and GDI to obtain true GDP.

This paper demonstrates that expenditure/income discrepancies appearing in national accounts are caused partly by the nominal distortion due to the presence of two price units, and partly by the real distortion due to the mismeasurement of expenditure items. In addition, it investigates how such statistical discrepancies reveal potentially important information about various informal, though not necessarily illegal, economic activities, which are not grasped fully by statistical or tax authorities in a central government. Three cases are explored in detail. First, after-consumption-tax prices are mixed with before-consumption-tax prices in aggregating expenditures. Second, black-market prices coexist with official prices in a heavily controlled economy. Third, prices are quoted in not only a conventional currency unit, but also a more valuable cryptocurrency unit; however, the latter unit is still evaluated one to one with the former. Unlike in macroeconomic disequilibrium models, statistical discrepancies are not ex ante concepts, but they actually occur ex post. This paper examines how ex post excess demand/supply within the formal economy, resulting from such discrepancies, is adjusted by monetary and nonmonetary interactions with the informal or underground economy.

This study explores the use of initial funding sources using a unique sample of various types of start-up firms in Japan obtained from multiple surveys. We provide evidence on the differences in the use of initial funding sources and their determinants across start-up firms by estimating a multivariate probit model. Our findings indicate that founders’ human capital, entrepreneurial commitment, growth orientation, innovativeness, physical capital, and the presence of predecessors or parent firms are important determinants of their choice of initial funding sources. Specifically, while start-up firms with growth orientation and those that engage in innovative activities are more likely to use subsidies and funds from private equity investors, those with physical capital are more likely to use bank borrowing.

What influence does career-relevant information have on occupational choices? This study analyzes changes in career preferences related to the provision of career-relevant information through a cluster-randomized controlled trial with students at a rural Japanese high school. We examined the potential effects of two types of information, including an information regarding impact of technological innovation on labor markets program (the “ICT-AI Impact on the Labor Market” program) and an information regarding how to deepen “self-understanding” (the “self-understanding” program). The results reveal that the ICT-AI Impact program did not induce statistically significant shifts in students’ occupational choices. By contrast, the self-understanding program shifted students’ occupational choices regarding professional occupations such as educational, medical, and legal professions. Our findings indicate that career-relevant information provision can be an effective policy tool in the labor market because the provision can support students’ occupational choices.

In open competitive tendering in Japan, one-party bid events where only one contractor submits a bid frequently occur. This situation has been criticized as hindering economic efficiency and fairness. This study uses bidding records to statistically analyze the factors that influence the number of bidders and cause one-party bids, which subsequently influence the win-reserve ratio. We found that fewer bidders participate in bidding for deals that require relationship-specific investments, resulting in a higher win-reserve ratio. In biddings with ambiguous specifications and incomplete contracts, more bidders participate, leading to a lower win-reserve ratio. Aside from these indirect effects mediated by the number of bidders, some factors directly influence the win-reserve ratio. Interestingly, indirect and direct effects conflict for follow-up deals and deal size. Thus, by highlighting deal-specific factors and differentiating between indirect and direct effects, this study brings new insights into the discussion on bidder behavior and its outcomes.

In this study, we examined the effect of the order of shortening business hours of the restaurants, which are considered a major source of spreading the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Specifically, we empirically investigated how this order changed the nighttime light (NTL) in regions with restaurants in the Greater Tokyo area from January to June 2020. Several local governments in Japan had implemented the order to combat COVID-19. Our investigation found evidence that the order significantly decreased the NTL in regions with many restaurants, indicating the effectiveness of the order and its negative economic/business impacts on restaurants. Interestingly, this order increased the NTL in other areas, such as in residential areas. In contrast to previous studies focused on demand-side factors, our study revealed the importance of supply-side factors in explaining the impact of Japanese government policy against COVID-19 in the first half of 2020.