Resistance to Trade Liberalization in Unionized Sector

This paper studies the lobbying against trade liberalization by both a firm and a union in the same industry. We find that the relationship between their political activities depends on the effect of political activity by one on the marginal effectiveness of political activity by the other. We also show that, when they are strongly risk-averse and their political activities are strategic complements, trade liberalization is likely to be successful if business is brisk, the foreign firm's production cost is high or the number of union members is small. However, when they are not strongly risk-averse, these results hold reversely.     

Mixed duopoly: Differential game approach

This study formulates a dynamic mixed oligopoly model, in which a state‐owned public firm competes against a private firm over multiple periods. We adopt a differential game formulated by Fershtman and Kamien [Econometrica 55 (1987), pp. 1151–1164] and investigate how the dynamic competition affects the optimal privatization policy. We characterize the open‐loop Nash equilibrium (OLNE) and Markov‐perfect Nash equilibrium (MPNE). We show that in the MPNE, an increase in the degree of privatization has a nonmonotonic effect on the price, increasing it in a wide range of parameter spaces, which is in sharp contrast to the result in the OLNE or static analyses. We also find that the optimal degree of privatization is higher in the MPNE than that in the OLNE and static equilibrium. These results suggest that intertemporal strategic behavior changes the optimal privatization policy.     

Defect Detection Using Unanimous Vote Among Mahalanobis Classifiers for Each Color Component

In manufacturing industries, product inspection is automated and the use of image data is increasingly being employed for defect detection. A manufacturing company in Japan produces an item and inspects the produced products using image data. Reducing the error rate is important in product inspection because poor inspection of products might lead to the delivery of defective products to consumers (consumer’s risk) and strict inspection increases production cost (producer’s risk). To reduce the error rate, we highlighted fault points using a two-dimensional moving range filter and discriminated defect production through a unanimous vote among Mahalanobis classifiers for each color component. For results, we achieved a lower error rate than the current system. This research is an empirical study of how to use image data in defect detection.     

The effects of the raising-the-official-pension-age policy in an overlapping generations economy

This paper studies how economic variables are affected by raising the official pension age. Although it is said that such a policy increases output, this paper shows that such a statement is not necessarily true. Moreover, the paper finds that the social security benefit can decrease, which implies that it might be impossible to sustain the same level of benefit only by such a policy.     

Long-term effects of labor market conditions on family formation for Japanese youth

This study aims to examine how each cohort’s family formation is affected by labor market conditions experienced in youth in Japan. Although the deterioration in youth employment opportunities has often been blamed for Japan’s declining fertility rate, the effect of slack labor market conditions on fertility is theoretically unclear. We estimate the effects of regional labor market conditions at entry to the labor market and contemporaneous conditions on fertility, controlling for nation-wide year effects and prefecture fixed effects, and find the following. First, high school-educated women who experienced a recession while entering the labor market are less likely to have children. In contrast, a recession rather increases fertility among college-educated women. When summed up, the aggregate impact of labor market conditions experienced in youth on fertility is weak. Second, the unemployment rate at entry to the labor market is positively correlated with the probability of having two or more children conditionally on having at least one child. Third, the contemporaneous unemployment rate is negatively correlated with marriage of women in the local labor market, although the correlation is weak and concentrated on the less educated group.     

Role of linking mechanisms in multitask agency with hidden information

We investigate the adverse selection problem where a principal delegates multiple tasks to an agent. We characterize the virtually implementable social choice functions by using the linking mechanism proposed by Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007) [20] that restricts the message spaces. The principal does not require any incentive wage schemes and can therefore avoid any information rent and welfare loss. We show the resemblance between the functioning of this message space restriction and that of incentive wage schemes. We also extend the results of the single-agent model to the multi-agent model.     

A Note on the 'Invariance of Market Innovation to the Number of Firms'*

This note disputes the claim by Sah and Stiglitz ( Rand Journal of Economics , 1987, pp.  98–108) that their strong invariance result holds in a wide range of situations.     

An Hedonic Analysis of the Rental Office Market in the Tokyo Central Business District: 1985–1994 Fiscal Years

We study the rental office market in the Tokyo central business district by estimating hedonic equations for the office rent for 1985–94 fiscal years. This period includes the "Bubble" of asset prices, followed by its deflation. We find that the characteristics related to transportational conveniences are less effective in explaining office rents than the characteristics related to the agglomeration of offices and the amenity characteristics of the office buildings themselves. Using a skewed error-term specification, we show that the discount in rental transactions is not irrelevant. The hedonic office rent indices and possible policy implications are also presented.
JEL Classification Numbers: L85, R32.     

Welfare effects of bubbles in an endogenous growth model

This paper examines welfare effects of asset bubbles in an endogenous growth model with overlapping generations. In our model, a steady-state equilibrium with bubbles exists only if the presence of bubbles raises the welfare level of the initial generation. Bubbles can be beneficial to generations born at relatively early dates, whereas they reduce the welfare level of sufficiently distant future generations. Increasing the rate of supply of the useless asset improves the lifetime utilities of future generations.     

Urbanization,informal sector,and development

Urbanization is a universal phenomenon in the postwar world, but its qualitative nature is varied across countries. Some nations have experienced urbanization that accompanied skill upgrading, industrialization, and the expansion of the urban formal (modern) sector, but others urbanized without such modernization and underwent the expansion of the urban informal (traditional) sector simultaneously. The question that naturally arises is what are the underlying causes for the differences. The purpose of the paper is to tackle this question analytically based on a dynamic model of urbanization and development.