Journal of the Japanese and International Economies最新文献

We use unique data on Japanese SMEs to investigate how the bank-firm relationship affects the loan maturity of SMEs in Japan. We apply Diamond's (1991) model on the firms’ choice of long- versus short-term debt to the context of SME lending and test a prediction in a manner faithful to the applied model. We find that the ratio of long-term loans decreases with the strength of bank-firm relationships as measured by their duration. This finding is consistent with the prediction and suggest that SMEs take into account the benefit of information production by banks and the cost of liquidation when determining the loan maturity.

If free lending in public libraries is displacing sales in bookstores, some compensation may be needed to maintain incentives for authors to create new works. To determine whether this is indeed the case, we created a novel dataset that integrated bookstore sales data with public library copy data in Japan and quantified the displacement effects of public libraries. Controls for title-municipality, months-after-publication, and municipality-month-specific unobserved heterogeneity were introduced. The study found that a library copy displaced the sales of the title in the municipality by approximately 0.24 copies per month for the top 1/6 popular books and 0.52 copies for bestsellers. Various robustness checks were consistent with the baseline results; thus, the study confirmed the displacement effects of popular books.

This article examined the effect of participation in global value chains (GVCs) on productivity for Japanese manufacturing firms by using firm-level data obtained from the Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities [Kigyo Katsudo Kihon Chosa], Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. We define a firm engaged in both importing and exporting as a GVC firm. Our analysis is conducted for the period 1994–2018, and it covers approximately 10,000 firms for each year with some variations during the period. We combine the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Difference in Differences (DID) estimation methods, in order to examine the impact of a shift from non-GVC firm to GVC firm, or participation in GVC by a non-GVC firm, on its productivity. To test the importance of experiences in GVC participation on productivity (learning effect), we estimated the impact not only for the first year of GVC participation but also for subsequent five years. Our analysis showed the impact of GVC participation on productivity is positive for our 110 estimations with few exceptions, and the estimated coefficients are statistically significant for approximately 35 percent of the cases. These findings indicate that the impact of GVC participation on productivity for Japanese manufacturing firms is generally positive, but the impact is not very strong. We also found that the magnitude of positive coefficient increased over time, indicating that it takes GVC participating firms time and experiences to assimilate new technology and management know-how they acquired through GVC participation.

Political conflict between nations sometimes leads to consumer boycotts. We examine the regional impacts of bilateral boycott activity by investigating the 2019 Korean consumer boycott of travel to Japan. Employing triple- and double-differences designs, we find that the impact of the boycott is large and regionally heterogeneous. Japanese prefectures with high (i.e., 75th percentile) pre-boycott dependency on visitors from Korea suffer bilateral export losses of 56.9 to 60.9 percent and aggregate export losses of 10.5 to 13.3 percent. Prefectures with low (i.e., 25th percentile) Korea dependency experience bilateral losses of 47.8 to 49.7 percent and aggregate losses of 3.3 to 4.2 percent.

The member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have made significant efforts to increase intra-ASEAN trade by reducing or eliminating tariffs in the region. However, intra-ASEAN trade as a percentage of total trade in the region has not increased significantly; instead, ASEAN countries' imports from China have grown dramatically. In this study, we examine the causal impacts of imports from China on intra-ASEAN trade by estimating gravity-type equations for intra-ASEAN trade at a highly disaggregated product level for the period 2000–2019. In particular, we address the issues of including observations with zero-valued trade and endogeneity in a gravity equation with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects. As a result, we found that imports from China significantly increase, rather than decrease, intra-ASEAN trade.

This article aims to contribute to the nascent literature on the effect of non-reciprocal trade preferences (NRTPs) on economic complexity in beneficiary countries. It investigates the effect of NRTPs (Generalized Systems of Preferences - GSP - and other trade preferences) offered by the QUAD countries (Canada, the European Union, Japan, and the United States) on the beneficiary countries' levels of economic complexity. The analysis has used a panel dataset of 110 beneficiary countries over the period of 2002-2018, and the two-step system Generalized Method of Moments estimator. Results show that the utilization of NRTPs (either GSP programs or other trade preferences) influences positively economic complexity when beneficiary-countries' shares of exports under the relevant NRTP in total merchandise exports is very high. In addition, GSP programs and other trade preferences jointly promote economic complexity, if the utilization of either NRTP reaches high levels. The utilization of NRTPs also enhances economic complexity in countries that receive high shares of foreign direct investment flows in GDP. Finally, development aid flows are strongly complementary with the utilization of NRTPs in fostering economic complexity, especially when they reach very high amounts. One message conveyed by this analysis is that preference-granting countries (including QUAD countries) should offer both generous NRTPs and high amounts of development aid if NRTPs were to be effective in expanding the manufacturing base in the beneficiary countries, and in particular, in improving their economic complexity.

This study examines the impact of a large credit shock on employment in Japan during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008–2009. To identify which firms faced a serious credit shock, we used variations in the long-term debt that must be repaid in the crisis. Because long-term debt takes more than one year to mature, it was determined independently of employment adjustments during the crisis. Therefore, using long-term debt maturing in a crisis, it is possible to identify the impact of exogenous tightening of the borrowing constraint on employment. We found that companies with a higher ratio of long-term debt maturing during the crisis had a greater negative impact on employment. In particular, the impact increased as the period passed from the shock, and this feature was most conspicuous in the group with the highest proportion of long-term debt maturing in the crisis.

The hospitals in Japan have hitherto had complete autonomy in deciding whether to admit COVID-19 patients. In fact, they were “swinging” between admitting or not COVID-19 patients, especially during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. To address endogenous decision making, we estimated the effect of admitting COVID-19 patients on hospital profits using instrumental variable (IV) regression. We derived the IVs from the guidelines of the national government on which hospital types should admit COVID-19 patients. Our empirical results revealed that the monthly profits per bed decreased by approximately JPY 600,000 ($\approx$ USD 4615), which is 15 times the average monthly profit in 2019. This overwhelming financial damage indicates it is costly for some hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients because of their low suitability in admitting such patients. Based on the implications of our main results, we propose an alternative strategy to handling patient surges in case of new infectious disease outbreaks.

This study investigates the short-term effects of public-sponsored job training (PJT) for the unemployed on their subsequent working status and income using a large-scale Japanese government survey and the propensity score matching technique. We find a significantly positive effect on the probability of working for both men and women; however, the point estimate is larger for women than for men. We also find a gendered difference in the effects on income and probability of being employed as a regular worker, with significantly positive effects for women but no significant effects for men, suggesting that PJT might be more effective for women. We confirm that the results are robust to a range of empirical specifications.