The Chinese Stock Market Does not React to the Japanese Market: Using Intraday Data to Analyse Return and Volatility Spillover Effects

In this paper, we use high‐frequency data to explore the effects of return and volatility spillover during periods in which trading hours in China and Japan overlap. Specifically, we utilize 5‐min returns to estimate fractionally integrated asymmetric power autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and fractionally integrated exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models, then use the models' standardized residuals to employ a cross‐correlation function approach that tests for the degree to which the Chinese and Japanese markets affect each other. Results indicate a unidirectional influence of the Chinese stock market on Japanese markets in terms of return. This result is likely attributable to restrictions on foreign investment in the Chinese market and the lack of diversified international portfolios among individual Chinese investors.     

Trade policy preference,childhood sporting experience,and informal school curriculum: An examination of views of the TPP from the viewpoint of behavioral economics

We investigated how childhood education and experiences helped to form noncognitive skills and later, trade policy preferences. We used individual‐level data with approximately 10,000 observations collected in July 2016. Using the instrumental variables (IV) method, with sporting experience and informal education in the childhood as exogenous IV, we found that (1) sporting experiences and informal education lead people to have positive subjective views about the role of group work, competition, reciprocity, and generalized trust and (2) positive views about the role of group work, competition, reciprocity, and trust leads people to prefer the Trans‐Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPP).     

Effects of Pregnancy and Birth on Smoking and Drinking Behaviours: A Comparative Study Between Men and Women

Using panel data obtained from monthly surveys for 3 years, we examined how the effects of life events on smoking and drinking behaviours differ between men and women. The key findings were that: (i) consumption of alcohol and cigarettes by men and women were lower during pregnancy and after childbirth than before pregnancy; (ii) pregnancy and childbirth led women to stop drinking and led men to reduce their alcohol consumption but not to stop drinking; and (iii) marriage, pregnancy and childbirth led women to stop smoking and marriage and birth led men to stop smoking but the effects of pregnancy on men are unclear.     

Special Quotes Invoke Autocorrelation in Japanese Stock Prices*

It is reported in the present paper that 1‐min returns on TOPIX have exhibited significant autocorrelation at 5‐min intervals since 1997/1998. Special quotes that are issued whenever there is a price jump in excess of a predetermined band seem to be the source of this autocorrelation, because these have been automatically updated at 5‐min intervals since August 1998 and have appeared during the first 30 min from opening. Individual stock returns also exhibit fifth‐order autocorrelation, but this disappears when the data with special quotes are excluded from the sample. Therefore, the autocorrelation is caused by the special quotes: a type of market microstructure noise.     

Japanese industrial finance at the close of the 19th century: Trade credit and financial intermediation

In a series of recent studies, several economic historians (most prominently Richard Sylla) argue that successful economies experience “financial revolutions” before undergoing rapid growth. In the U.S., they suggest Hamilton masterminded the financial revolution by putting the public finance in order and facilitating private banks. Might Matsukata, they continue, have done the same in Japan? Japan did indeed experience a financial revolution in the late 19th century. Matsukata, however, did not mastermind the revolution in advance of private-sector demand. Instead, private investors created much of the financial infrastructure in response to demand from industrial firms. What is more, most firms (at least in the pivotal silk industry) raised the funds they needed through trade credit rather than securities markets or banks.     

The Industrial Organization of Financial Markets in Thailand

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the industrial organizational features of the financial markets in Thailand which may play an important role in promoting the recent high economic growth. Specifically, we examine whether or not the market-structure-performance hypothesis is valid by estimating profit and cost functions. The main results are as follows:
1) market concentration in Thailand is higher than in Japan;
2) expense rate of Thai commercial banks is considerably higher than Japanese banks;
3) economies of scale are not found;
4) the more concentrated the market is, the larger are the profits and costs of the commercial banks.     

Koizumi carried the day: Did the Japanese election results make people happy and unhappy?

This paper investigates whether the Japanese people were happy and unhappy with the general election conducted on September 11, 2005, in which the Prime Minister, Koizumi, won a landslide victory. We conducted a large survey just after the election to ask people how happy they were and which party they had supported. Although there are consistent tendencies that supporters of ruling parties were happier and supporters of opposition parties were unhappier, the effect was not significant. Considering the results of previous studies that showed that Americans demonstrated significant responses to the result of a presidential election, this study suggests that the Japanese people are indifferent to politics.     

The Implications of Trade Credit for Bank Monitoring: Suggestive Evidence from Japan

Firms in modern developed economies borrow from both banks and trade partners. Using Japanese manufacturing data from the 1960s, we estimate the price of trade credit, and explore some of the ways firms choose between the credit and bank loans. We find that firms of all sizes borrow heavily from their trade partners, and at implicit rates that track the explicit rates banks would charge. They borrow from banks when they anticipate needing money for relatively long periods; they turn to trade partners when they face short-term unexpected exigencies. This apparent contrast in the term structures follows, we suggest, from the fundamentally different way bankers and trade partners cut default risk. Because bankers seldom know their borrowers' industries first hand, they rely on formal legal protection (like security interests). Because trade partners know the industry well, they reduce risk by monitoring their borrowers closely instead. Because the costs to creating legal mechanisms are heavily front-loaded, bankers focus on long-term debt; because the costs of monitoring debtors are ongoing, trade creditors do not. Apparently, banks monitor less than we have thought.