Journal of the Japanese and International Economies最新文献

The dynasty model, which assumes the presence of intergenerational altruism, implies that business owners will have more incentive to improve the firm’s performance if they expect their children to take over the firms. This study empirically examines how top managers’ expectations about future family succession affect the performance of small family firms. Exploiting the sex of the top manager’s first-born child as an instrumental variable for the manager’s expectations about business succession by his child, we find that the existence of a potential family successor has a positive effect on profit. We also find that the presence of a potential family successor induces business expansion and the managers’ actions to enhance performance, such as improving operational efficiency and investing in information technology.

Using unique data from a Japanese survey, this paper examines whether flexible work arrangements targeted specifically at workers with caregiving responsibilities under the Child Care and Family Care Leave Act help family caregivers reconcile paid work with care provision. The regression results suggest that access to caregiver leave, which allows family caregivers to take a continuous leave of up to 93 days, is negatively and significantly associated with the probability of leaving one's job within one year of the onset of demand for parental care. This alleviating effect of access to caregiver leave remains robust even in the longer term and in a specification where we take into account the possible endogeneity of care provision to the labor supply decision. The findings of this paper thus suggest that the caregiver leave introduced pursuant to the Act in Japan helps meet the need of family caregivers to take a certain period of time off from work to make the necessary arrangements for accommodating the sudden and unexpected demand for elderly care in their daily lives.

Preventing the occurrence of vacant houses and reutilizing existing vacant houses are two known ways of addressing housing vacancies. This study uses parcel-level data on single-family houses in the municipality of Toshima in Tokyo, Japan, to examine determinants of the occurrence and reutilization of vacant houses. The data reveal that, conditional on land prices, houses with restricted and costly redevelopment opportunities are more likely to become vacant. The results suggest that owners with such properties disregard the redevelopment potential and, as a result, tend to have a high reservation price relative to the market value. Consequently, owners face difficulty finding a transaction partner and even become reluctant to engage in a deal (i.e., they withdraw from the market). The results also suggest that revitalization of the neighborhood community may contribute to activating vacant houses. Local governments can use an empirical assessment such as this to implement efficient measures by targeting houses that have a high probability of becoming and remaining vacant.

This study quantified the effects of immigration policies in an aging and depopulating Japan. Under a constant total number of immigrants, it focused on the optimal period for an immigration policy that maximized per-capita utility. Simulation results, based on an extended lifecycle simulation model with endogenous fertility, showed that a longer period immigration policy increased the future population and enhanced long-run economic growth. Conversely, a shorter period immigration policy enhanced economic growth in earlier years but less so in the long run. This study found that an optimal duration for an immigration policy, under the standard parameter settings for Japan, was nine years; this finding was derived through reconciling the merits and demerits between shorter and longer period immigration policies.

This study examines the impact of population aging on regional savings rates in Japan, with particular attention to the regional flow of funds. Population aging has a positive impact on the average savings rate when the working-age population is large, it but has a negative impact when the working-age population decreases. Our empirical results, based on prefecture-level panel data, support the theoretical implication. After the mid-1990s, the working-age population declined, and the retired age population increased in many prefectures. As a result, population aging, which had a positive effect on the regional savings rate until the mid-1990s, came to have a negative effect thereafter. The empirical results suggest that in rural economies where deposits exceeded loans in the past, deposits are expected to decline due to the aging of society, resulting in a shortage of funds in the near future.

This study examines the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy in Japan. We apply the new identification strategy proposed by Bu et al. (2021) to the Japanese case and estimate monetary policy shocks that bridge periods of conventional and unconventional monetary policymaking. We show the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy; a contractionary monetary policy shock significantly decreases output and inflation rates even under the effective lower bound. However, because the shorter-term and longer-term nominal interest rates are already close to zero, the magnitude of monetary policy shocks on the macroeconomic variables is modest.

Tokyo Stock Exchange Trading Network (ToSTNeT) is a unique market in Japan in which firms can repurchase their shares during off-auction hours at a fixed price within a very short timeframe. In this study, we uncover a drawback in ToSTNeT which appears to have been exploited by managers of the repurchasing firms to favour certain sellers who have close economic ties with the firms. Further investigations reveal that it is impractical for retail investors to sell their shares on ToSTNeT. Our study proposes recommendations of regulatory and policy changes for the Tokyo Stock Exchange that may help tighten the loophole in ToSTNeT and safeguard the integrity of share repurchases in Japan.

Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson (2021) argued that the standard TFP growth is low during an investment boom for new technology such as the IT revolution. As the new capital is operated and productivity improves, the shape of the movements in the standard productivity growth resembles a J-curve. However, when costs associated with investment for new technology are recognized as intangible investment - which is not counted in the conventional value added –, the revised TFP growth including these unmeasured intangibles show different movements from the standard TFP growth. Following Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson (2021), we examine the gap between the standard TFP growth and the revised TFP growth. According to their theory, unmeasured intangibles are estimated by the gap between the shadow value and the price of investment goods. We obtain this shadow value of investment through an estimated parameter in each asset using listed firm-level data and revise the standard TFP growth rate. In the case of all industries, the standard TFP growth is overestimated in most years in the late 1990s and the 2000s, because the growth in intangible investment associated with measured investment is lower than measured capital accumulation rate. When we focus on the IT-intensive industries, we find the productivity J-curve in the late 1990s, at the early stage of the IT revolution, as indicated by Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson (2021).

We use the Japanese Management and Organizational Practices Survey (JP MOPS) across six industries to understand the unique and general features of Japanese management practices and their impact on productivity. This study uses management scores, constructed from survey questions about management practices, that intend to measure the quality of operational efficiency embedded in a set of management practices. Our analyses reveal several interesting and shared features of Japanese management practices. First, there is substantial variation in management scores across establishments in each industry. Second, the patterns of management practices and their association with potential drivers are quite similar across the six industries. Third, management scores are high when establishments recognize that they face many competitors. Fourth, management scores are positively associated with labor productivity in most industries. Finally, labor shares decline with management scores. This study shows important roles played by management practices in establishment and firm activities.