Journal of the Japanese and International Economies最新文献

It is often said that farmland conservation in urban areas (i.e., cities and inner suburbs) is not desirable because it hinders the conversion of farmland into residential areas, thereby deterring urbanization. To solve such a problem, the Japanese government rectified the property tax preferential treatment of urban farmland in the 1990s. We utilize this reform as a natural experiment and examine its impact on land use. The empirical results show that the reform did not encourage the conversion of urban farmland into housing lots. This is one of the reasons concerning the shortage of housing supply in urban areas in Japan.

We examine the effects of the largest-ever bank merger in the world at the time on unlisted firms through their firm-bank relationships to find the following: (1) Firms that transacted with both of the merged banks prior to the merger saw their borrowing costs increase by 13 bps relative to those that transacted with only one of them. (2) Firms that transacted with only one of the two merged banks saw their borrowing costs increase by a margin of 15 bps and a decrease in the amount of loans relative to firms that transacted with neither. The deterioration in borrowing conditions is more pronounced for smaller firms. (3) Despite the deterioration in firms’ borrowing conditions, there is no evidence of a persistent decline in borrower firms’ investment or sales. (4) There is no significant difference in the extent that borrowing costs increased and loan amounts decreased between firms that transacted with the acquiring bank and those that transacted with the acquired bank.

The present article tries to contribute to the literature dealing with the history of regional integration in East and Southeast Asia, reconciling the arguments defending that those territories are natural trading partners, those supporting that Western Empires enabled integration, and the ones claiming that it was the Japanese Empire which expanded regional trade. With this purpose, we reconstruct the region's bilateral imports before the establishment of Free Trade Areas and pioneer the econometric analysis of the main drivers of the commercial integration of East and Southeast Asia as a whole during the high colonial era (1840-1938). Our results display that countries' specific economic and cultural characteristics made them natural trading partners. However, intra-Asian trade acceleration during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was possible by the British imperialism of free trade and Japanese planned industrialization.

This paper analyzes a new fiscal rule and creative accounting using stock-flow adjustments. Previous studies investigate creative accounting using country- or state-level data, although the definitions of creative accounting differ depending on the study. We contribute to the literature on creative accounting by using Japanese municipality data from FY2007 to FY2010, following von Hagen and Wolff (2006). We focus on stock-flow adjustments by considering the relationship between the increase in the change in debt stock and the decrease in the deficit to measure creative accounting. Our contribution is the finding that municipalities engage in stock-flow adjustments by increasing their expenditures and revenues through intergovernmental transfers, which represents creative accounting because it allows municipalities to delay improving their fiscal conditions. To evaluate a new fiscal rule, we should check not only the targeted indexes but also the untargeted indexes, which municipalities do not have an incentive to control.

In Japan, the number of households targeted by employment support programs has increased rapidly since the Great Recession of 2008. This study analyzes whether these programs induce public assistance recipients to work. Drawing on a unique dataset for a representative Japanese municipality X, I estimate the program effects by using propensity score matching to address the selection bias. The analysis reveals several important findings. First, the programs raise the welfare recipients’ employment rate. Second, lock-in effects are not significantly observed in most cases. Third, the effects of the programs are not large enough to allow beneficiaries to get off welfare through employment. Finally, there is no substantial difference in the results pre- and post-matching.

Do individuals who want to leave a bequest work more and retire later than other individuals? Does the reason for wanting to leave a bequest (altruism vs. exchange) matter? In this paper, we conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of bequest motives on the labor supply and retirement behavior of households in Japan, and to the best of our knowledge, it is virtually the first paper to do so. We conduct an empirical analysis using micro data from a unique survey—the Preference Parameters Study of Osaka University—and show that respondents with an altruistic or strategic/exchange bequest motive work more at the intensive margin than those without any bequest motive but that respondents with a strategic or exchange bequest motive work less at the extensive margin (i.e., retire earlier) than those without any bequest motive. Our findings for the strategic or exchange motive suggest that respondents with such a motive tend to work more than others before they retire so that they can earn more, leave a larger bequest to their children, and elicit more care from them but that they tend to retire earlier than others so that they can start receiving care for themselves and their spouses from their children sooner. Our findings have important policy implications because they imply that inheritance taxes may affect people's labor supply and retirement behavior by influencing the strength of their bequest motives and that these effects may differ by the type of bequest motive.

Tariff pass-through is critical for considering the benefits of trade liberalization, the beneficiaries, and the extent. This study empirically examines the tariff pass-through in wholesaling through the wholesale firm-level data in Japan. In particular, the study focuses on wholesalers’ margin ratio, that is, (sales – procurements) / sales. We address the endogeneity concerns on the measurement errors of the study variables of margin ratio and tariffs. Consequently, the study found that importing wholesalers significantly raised their margin ratio against tariff reduction. On average, a 1 percentage point reduction of tariffs raised the margin ratio by approximately 0.25 percentage point. This rise is equivalent to that of sales prices to procurement prices by about 0.34 %, indicating that Japanese wholesalers capture one-third of the tariff rent. However, the study also found that a tariff reduction lowers the margin ratio of wholesalers who procure their products from domestic producers.

This paper examines the characteristics of remote work using a unique Japanese survey dataset that provides information on engagement in remote work together with the specific job tasks and human resource management (HRM) characteristics workers face. We show that the opportunity to work remotely was more likely to be available to those engaged in non-routine tasks as well as to workers subject to HRM practices presupposing that worker performance is measurable. The implications of these findings for income transfer policies and management practices in light of the COVID-19 pandemic are also discussed.

This paper examines the effects of female chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm performance. Using data on nonfinancial listed firms in Japan, we show that only 0.8% of some 42,000 firm-year observations have female CEOs. There is also little evidence that firms appoint more females as CEOs during our sample period. While the stock market reacts positively to the introduction of a firm's first female CEO, the relationship between CEO gender and firm accounting performance is generally not strong. However, when we classify the type of female CEO, the estimated coefficient for a founder female CEO and Tobin's Q is positive and significant.

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.