Management of rainfall-related environmental risks in urban area

Rainfall brings urban residents both benefits, such as water resources, but also adverse risks such as flooding. Additionally, it has been recognized that wet weather run-off discharges pollutants

and transfers chemicals and pathogen bacteria into the aquatic ecosystem. This causes not only deterioration of water quality but also environmental pollution risk. Both the flood risk and environmental pollution risk are treated here as ‘rainfall-related environmental risks’. Although these two kinds of risks are quite different in their characteristics, the main purpose of urban wet weather flow management is how to decrease these risks. Furthermore, these risks have a similar background which is concerned with both the urban structure and the life-style of urban residents. Recently, flood disaster has occurred in the Japanese urban area with increasing frequency causing damage due not only to rainfall intensity, but also the vulnerability of urban structures against heavy storms. Although there has been urban area expansion and a decline in substrate permeability, wet weather flow management in Japan is aimed simply to drain the increased run-off volume quickly. As for the management of hazardous chemicals which might be discharged together with rainfall run-off, this has not been implemented sufficiently. It is necessary to develop a methodology to reduce rainfall-related environmental risks in urban wet weather flow management. In this paper, the possible risk management process and control options of rainfall-related risks will be discussed after a summary of both the similar and differing points between inundation risk and environmental pollution risk. As a result, it is deemed necessary to operate a scheme to raise the rainfall-related environmental risk perception level of urban residents to ensure their participation in risk management.     

企业通过强化财务体制提高融资能力探析

文章从一名在日本多年从事银行融资管理和企业诊断专家的视野出发,以财务会计理论为起点,通过剖析金融机构投资对企业财务报表的分析和看法,发现两者的共同利益点,进而提出了企业想成功获得金融机构的融资,就要改善自身的财务体制,为众多融资困难的中小企业指明了一条有效的融资之路。     

The Effectiveness of Public Credit Guarantees in the Japanese Loan Market

This paper examines the effectiveness of public credit guarantee programs in not only increasing the availability of loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but in also improving the ex-post performance of borrowing firms. Using a unique panel data set, we identify the effects of a massive credit guarantee program implemented by the Japanese government from 1998 to 2001. While we do find that the availability of loans increased for program participants, when loans were provided by undercapitalized banks the increased liquidity persisted for only a few years. Further, the ex-post performance of program participants, with the exception of firms with sizable net worth, deteriorated relative to their non-participating counterparts.     

The impact of risk aversion on information transmission between firms

This paper investigates whether and to what extent the presence of risk aversion affects the welfare implications of information transmission in one of the most fundamental oligopoly models—a Cournot duopoly model with common demand uncertainty. It aims to make a bridge between the literature dealing with information sharing in oligopoly and the one discussing the firm under uncertainty. We can show that the average output level of each firm is quite sensitive to the type and amount of information, and that the presence of risk aversion has an effect of decreasing the welfare of firms, whence information transmission may sometimes be harmful rather than beneficial to risk averse firms. These results have some policy implications.We are indebted to Hirofumi Uzawa, Masao Fukuoka, Ryuzo Sato, Koichi Hamada, Michihiro Ohyama, Kunio Kawamata, Yasunori Ishii, Noboru Sakashita, Koji Okuguchi, and Masamichi Kawano for useful comments and discussions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Japan Association of Economic Theory and Econometrics, University of Tsukuba, October 1989, and at the Keio Conference on Market Mechanism and Industrial Organization, Hakone, November 1989. Any errors which may remain are our sole responsibility. Partial financial help from the Tokyo Council for Economic Research, New York University, and the Ministry of Education, Grant C-01530001 is gratefully acknowledged.     

Recalculating the agricultural labor force in China

In this study, we use a hypothetical method to recalculate the agricultural labor force based on statistical data on the labor force in China. We confirm the revised agricultural labor force data by estimating the agricultural production function. Through comparing the marginal labor productivity with the subsistence level of wages in the agricultural sector, we find that the overstated figures of agricultural labor force not only result in the underestimation of agricultural labor productivity but also are misleading by indicating that China reaches the Lewis turning point later than in actuality. The process of labor transfer in China, a large part of which is through rural migrant workers, has been much faster than expected.     

Firm age and the evolution of borrowing costs: Evidence from Japanese small firms

This paper investigates how firms’ borrowing costs evolve as they age. Using a new panel data set of about 100,000 bank-dependent small firms for 1997–2002 and focusing on the channel of “adaptation” (i.e., surviving firms’ borrowing costs decline as they age) and that of “selection” (i.e., total borrowing costs decline as defaulting firms exit), we find that the reputation hypothesis suggested by Diamond (1989) provides a more plausible explanation of the downward sloping age profile of borrowing costs than the firm dynamics (Cooley and Quadrini, 2001) or the relationship banking (Boot and Thakor, 1994) hypothesis. In addition, we examine whether the firm selection process in Japan has been natural or unnatural. Our findings suggest that it has been natural in that firms with lower quality are separated, face higher borrowing costs, and are eventually forced to exit, which contrasts with the results of previous studies on credit allocations in Japan, including Peek and Rosengren (2005). Further, we find that the evolution of borrowing costs is partially due to selection but is mainly attributable to adaptation.     

Emergent learning and change in strategy: empirical study of Chinese serial entrepreneurs with failure experience

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - The risk and uncertainty of entrepreneurial activity is high, and failures are common. The existing literature has emphasized that serial...     

Intellectual property right protection in the software market

We discuss the software patent should be granted or not. There exist two types of coping in the software market; reverse engineering and software duplication. Software patent can prevent both types of copies since a patent protects an invention. If the software is not protected by a patent, software producer cannot prevent reverse engineering. However, the producer can prevent the software duplication by a copyright. It is not clear the software patent is socially desirable when we consider these two types of coping. We obtain the following results. First, the number of copy users under the patent protection is greater than that under the copyright protection. Second, the government can increase social welfare by applying copyright protection when the new technology is sufficiently innovative.     

Industrial development in Malaysia and Singapore: Empirical analysis with multiple‐cone Heckscher–Ohlin Model

This paper employs the multiple‐cone Heckscher–Ohlin model to analyze industrial development in Malaysia and Singapore. In particular, we focus on industrial upgrading along with capital accumulation as a key determinant for the cross‐country difference in production technology and income. By pooling two countries’ data on factor endowment and sectoral output in manufacturing from 1990 to 2008, we estimate the common industrial development paths of the two‐cone Heckscher–Ohlin model, the Rybczynski linear relationship between capital–labor ratio and sectoral output per capita. Our results demonstrate that, after controlling for quality of workers (by educational attainment), the two countries resided in different cones during our sample period, implying that Singapore succeeded in accumulating capital steadily with the support of foreign investment and upgrading its industry mix to make it more capital‐intensive. The separation of cones is also consistent with the observed gap in gross domestic product per capita between the two countries. Furthermore, we implement a factor‐augmenting productivity test to see the gaps in efficiency of capital and human‐capital‐augmented labor and confirm no significant difference between the two countries.     

Jealousy and underconsumption in a one-sector model with wealth preference

The present paper examines the effects of consumption externalities on economic performance in a one-sector model with wealth preference. The presence of the wealth preference generates a wealth effect in consumption growth, which plays a crucial role for consumption externalities to have impacts on the economy. Our main findings are: (i) regardless of the assumption of inelastic labor supply, the distortionary effect of consumption externalities stays in the long run; (ii) the income tax as well as the consumption tax can modify the efficiency; and (iii) the numerical simulations supplement theoretical findings.