The Changing Nature of Japanese Production Systems in the 1990s and Issues for Labour Studies

The authors discuss the changing character of production strategies and organizational arrangements at three leading Japanese automotive assemblers against a background of concern with the impact of work regimes upon employees. Innovations in production line organization are compared within and between the companies, and the argument advanced suggests that the attempt to ‘humanize’ work routines and procedures, by the leading company especially, has met with mixed results. Sornetimcs more ‘efficient’ technologies and forms of organization have been inhibited in the pursuit of ‘human-centred’ forms of work organization. Nevertheless, the article points up the considerable variations which exist both between and within Japanese companies and trade unions with respect to the understanding of the role played by labour.     

Returns to Scale and Scale Elasticity in Farrell,Russell and Additive Models

This research extends the Farrell-based returns to scale methodology into Russell and Additive models in three ways with the focus of relationships between interior points and projected points. First, we present and prove four theorems that identify the scale nature. Second, we compare these results with the scale elasticity results. Third, we present techniques for estimating upper and lower bounds for the scale elasticities.     

Market discipline and bank efficiency

This paper investigates whether depositors and market investors exert disciplinary pressure on bank management in terms of efficiency improvement. We find that banks with more outstanding deposits are more cost-efficient, although little effect is found with respect to profit efficiency. This implies that depositors, the primary providers of funds to banks, likely play an important role in disciplining bank management, at least in terms of enforcing efficient use of inputs. Market discipline has garnered increasing attention as a mechanism to ensure bank soundness. Our results imply that depositors, the largest creditors to banks, may be of primary importance in this mechanism.     

What Do Banks Evaluate When They Screen Borrowers? Soft Information, Hard Information and Collateral

By applying factor analysis to unique data on loan screening for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan, we investigate the factors that banks actually evaluate when underwriting commercial loans. We find that banks emphasize three factors when they decide whether to grant loans: the relationship factor, the financial statement factor, and the collateral/guarantee factor. We also find that smaller banks place greater emphasis on the relationship and the collateral/guarantee factors, and that banks under competitive pressure emphasize the relationship factor to a greater extent. We interpret these findings based on the theory of relationship lending and lending technologies.     

UNEMPLOYMENT, TRANS-BOUNDARY POLLUTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN A DUALISTIC ECONOMY

This study is intended to examine the effects of environmental policies on employment, the use of polluting goods, and the unemployment rate under a model introducing trans-boundary pollution affecting the productivity of the other productive sectors. That model was designed by Copeland and Taylor (1999) , and transformed into a dualistic economy model constructed by Harris and Todaro (1970) . Results of our analyses show that enforcement of environmental policy through control of emissions taxes does not necessarily worsen urban unemployment. Therefore, we show that it is not usually proper to maintain that some environmental pollution cannot be avoided to establish economic development. Moreover, we analyze the effect of some environmental policies on social welfare and discuss the effectiveness of those policies.     

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.