Optimal Investment in Transportation Infrastructure When Middlemen Have Market Power: A Developing-Country Analysis

Transportation costs and buyer market power reduce prices and income received by farmers in developing countries. Transportation costs directly affect the marketing margin and also exacerbate market power by limiting farmers' access to buyers. This article develops a multistage spatial model to determine optimal investment in transportation improvements, taking account of impacts on marketing costs and competition. The beneficial impact of investments from farmers' perspective is mainly through enhanced competition, meaning significant under-investment may occur if this effect is ignored. However, the optimal investment depends on the relative importance of transportation costs; in some settings, transportation improvements reduce farm prices because buyers rationally over-compensate farmers for these costs.     

Stock market booms in economies damaged during World War II

Some studies find that real equity prices in economies damaged during World War II tended to rise sharply at the beginning of actual damage taking place during the war. This paper introduces an empirically plausible degree of persistence from the impact of World War II and demonstrates that stock market booms in economies damaged during the war are consistent with an equilibrium model of asset pricing.     

Do the equity holding and soundness of bank underwriters affect issue costs of SEOs?

This paper examines the effects of characteristics of bank underwriters on issue costs in seasoned equity offerings in Japan following deregulation in 1999. I find that banks’ holding loans have a negative effect on price discounts and no effect on underwriting fees. However, banks’ equity holdings have no effect on discount rates and a positive effect on underwriting fees. Furthermore, issuers with unhealthy banks pay higher discount rates, are more likely to be weak in their ex-post operating performance, and are less willing to switch underwriters. I conclude that the characteristics of banks have different effects on issue costs.     

The effects of skirt lining properties on comfort and movement

This study was conducted to clarify the influences of the lining properties of skirts upon comfort and movement. The comfort of lining fabrics and real skirts with and without lining was rated by sensory tests on the basis of sensorial comfort on the skin and body movement. Actual body movements were investigated by motion analysis while the skirts were being worn. The results are described: (1) Comfort on the skin, movement and overall preference for the lining fabrics were evaluated by sensory testing, comparing skirts made with five kinds of lining fabrics. Conventional non‐stretch cupro lining was ranked first on the basis of smoothness and good feel to the skin. Two‐way stretch lining was also ranked highly in terms of ease of movement. We discuss how sensorial comfort on the skin and ease of movement related to overall preference for lining fabrics. (2) Sensory test of the actual skirts with and without lining clearly confirmed that lining played a role in improving comfort. (3) For a non‐stretch fabric skirt, conventional lining was ranked highly for good feel to the skin, and two‐way stretch lining was considered useful for ease of movement. There was no significant difference between the two lining fabrics in overall preference. (4) For a stretch fabric skirt, stretch lining is the most useful because it maintains easy extension of the outer fabric, thus allowing ease of body movement. (5) Motion analysis showed that a combination of knitted stretch skirts with stretch lining was the best for ease of movement. Comparing the sidelines and the hemline of the stretch fabric skirts demonstrated a better shape using lining.     

Measuring Multinationals' R&D Activities in China on the Basis of a Patent Database: Comparing European,Japanese and US Firms

Using an internationally linked patent database, this paper compares the types of R&D activities undertaken by multinationals in China by home country and industry. In China, multinationals recently began investing in R&D, mainly in the areas of product and manufacturing process development. However, US firms, which are the most actively invested in R&D, are involved in some technology‐driven R&D activities; European firms are inclined toward market‐driven R&D, while Japanese firms, which lag behind the other two, focus on production‐driven R&D. This pattern may be related to the relative competitiveness of each country: Japanese firms are strong in electronics and automobiles, where production process improvement is important, while US firms flourish in science‐based industries, such as pharmaceuticals and software, where interacting with the local science base is a critical factor.     

Voluntarily separable repeated Prisonerʼs Dilemma with reference letters

We consider the voluntarily separable repeated Prisoner?s Dilemma model in which players randomly meet and form pairs to repeatedly play Prisoner?s Dilemma only by mutual agreement. While the literature has dealt with the case of no information flow across partnerships, we consider the case in which players can issue a “reference letter” to verify at least that the partnership entered the cooperation phase. We show that such reference letters can be voluntarily provided by the partners even at some cost, and that the sheer existence of a letter shortens the trust-building periods and thus improves social efficiency.     

Population and Urbanization Trends in Post-war Japan

This paper analyses the population change and urbanization process in post-war Japan. We trace the process of population concentration into urban areas, in parallel with economic development after the war. The concentration of population into urban areas can be characterized by three major metropolitan regions: Tokyo, Keihanshin (Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe) and Nagoya. We also show that the urbanization process of Japan in the period from 1965 to 1985 can be characterized by two spatial phenomena; firstly, the suburbanization of the existing metropolitan areas and, secondly, the spatial dispersal of urbanized areas.     

Selective Immigration and Ethnic Economic Achievement: Japanese Americans before World War II

This article examines the determinants of Japanese immigrant economic achievement in the continental United States before World War II. Japanese immigrants to the United States were a select group in terms of their occupational background and education relative to the Japanese population as a whole because of the restrictions imposed on Japanese immigration by both the Japanese and U.S. governments. Furthermore, the selective nature of Japanese immigration contributed to the economic achievement of Japanese Americans before World War II, when their occupational position underwent a dramatic improvement. This finding differs from the standard cultural explanation of ethnic economic achievement.     

An efficiency measure satisfying the Dmitruk–Koshevoy criteria on DEA technologies

The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficiency measurement model by enhancing a CCR (Charnes?CCooper?CRhodes) model and then to prove that the enhanced model satisfies five desirable properties: indication, strict monotonicity, homogeneity, continuity and units unvariance. In order for our model to be empirically tractable, we also provide an algorithm aimed at estimating efficiency scores.