Foreign banks in Japan: A study of a Japanese deregulation process

The deregulation of foreign banks in Japan, although corresponding in broad outline to world-wide trends, has diverged substantially in many particulars from patterns seen elsewhere. It has tended to be excruciatingly slow and piecemeal and to have been of minimal benefit to foreign banks. A review of this process leads to the conclusion that these characteristics result from organisational and political-bureaucratic factors inherent to the Japanese style of government which is, in turn, partially a reflection of Japanese culture. Although these non-economic factors have influenced the specific pattern of change, its overall direction appears to have been consistent with the broader national interest.The authors wish to acknowledge financial support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Florsheimer Center for Policy Studies, and the Krueger Center for Financial Research.     

THE LAST MILE: AN EXAMINATION OF EFFECTS OF ONLINE RETAIL DELIVERY STRATEGIES ON CONSUMERS

The Internet has increased the level of importance of the end‐consumer market to transportation carriers. In two between subject experiments, carrier disclosure on retail merchant websites is examined as a strategic differentiation strategy. Predictions are offered concerning effects of carrier disclosure strategies on product delivery‐related expectations, consumer attitudes, and intentions to purchase a product online. Results from Study 1 reveal significant differences between disclosure and nondisclosure of the carrier for numerous product delivery‐related variables, as well as many differences between the six carriers examined in this first study. Study 2 extends these findings by showing that providing consumers with a choice of carrier leads to increased levels of satisfaction with the online experience and greater willingness to buy, relative to nondisclosure and disclosure strategies.     

Sources of Sectoral Growth in an Economy Wide Context: The Case of U.S. Agriculture

Growth in U.S. agriculture is linked to the non-farm economy through domestic terms of trade and factor market adjustments. With almost stable input growth, the relatively large contributions from growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are passed on to intermediate and final consumers in the form of declining real prices for primary farm products. The resulting net growth in the real value of farm output (GDP) is relatively low (0.25% per annum). The decomposition of TFP suggests that public agricultural stock of knowledge and infrastructure are robustly associated with TFP growth, while spill-overs from private agricultural and economy wide research and development (R and D) are positive but, relatively small.     

Existence of a Pareto-optimal equilibrium in nearly-stationary overlapping-generations economies

Summary In overlapping-generations models of fiat money, the existence of a Pareto-optimal equilibrium — which defines an optimal quantity of money — is more general than well-known counter-examples suggest. Those examples, having no optimal equilibrium just because there are small variations in households' tastes and endowments across generations, are not typical. On the contrary: For an open-dense, full-measure subset of smooth stationary economies and an open-dense subset of continuous stationary economies, introducing small variations in tastes and endowments across generations preserves the existence of an optimal equilibrium. Put simply, optimal equilibria generically exist for nearly-stationary economies.I thank Scott Freeman, Katsuhiko Kawai, and two referees for proofreading this text; all lead to clarifications.