The Effectiveness of Social Media for Business Activities in Japanese Firms

A large number of firms use social media for various business activities. This paper clarifies how social media has become effective to sales in Japanese firms. To this purpose, the following are addressed: (i) whether social media is useful for company activities, (ii) what kinds of business activities are affected using social media, and (iii) how social media improves the final outcomes of sales for firms. This study uses data of business activities and social media conducted in 2014. Probit analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) are employed. Probit analysis clarifies the relationships between the effects of social media and its use in sales. The SEM model clarifies the relationships among the effects of social media use in business. In the SEM, a model is examined by taking sales caused by use of social media as an explained variable, while the explanatory variables are the first and intermediate effects of social media. The results indicate that social media is effective for business activities such as promoting sales. This study may help to promote social media in Japanese firms.     

Market integration,environmental policy,and transboundry pollution from consumption

Recent empirics report that transport cost reductions significantly contribute to rapidly growing world trade. This article develops a reciprocal market model of intra-industry trade with transboundary pollution from consumption to consider how market integration in the form of transport cost reductions affects the noncooperative choice of an environmental policy and the equilibrium welfare. I show that market integration can improve welfare locally, but that welfare under any non-prohibitive trade cost can not be higher than welfare under autarky. This possibility of trade losses exhibits a sharp contrast to the case of production-generated pollution.     

Network externalities,transport costs,and tariffs

This article formulates a reciprocal market model of international duopoly with network externalities to reconsider welfare effects of reductions in transport costs and tariffs. Depending on the magnitude of network externalities, we show two possibilities. One of them, which emerges under strong network externalities, illustrates that freer trade unambiguously improves welfare for any initial level of trade barriers. This finding provides an affirmative evaluation of freer trade.     

Temporary and Permanent Immigration under Unionization

This paper investigates permanent and temporary immigration and remittance under the coexistence of unionized and non‐unionized manufacturing firms in a two‐sector economy. The impacts of immigration and remittance on respectively wages, employment, the union–non‐union wage gap and national welfare are analyzed. It is found that both permanent immigration (economy‐wide) and temporary immigration in agriculture bring positive effects on most variables (except the competitive wage), but widens the wage gap and causes income redistribution in the host country. However, if temporary immigrants work in manufacturing only, then all wages and the union–non‐union wage gap fall. That is, workers become more equally paid but poorer. In addition, remittance and globalization cause negative effects on union workers and employers. It is perhaps such consequences and the income redistribution effect of immigration that cause the media to paint a negative image of immigration.     

Transboundary Pollution and International Migration

We analyze the welfare effects of international migration in the presence of transboundary pollution. We use a simplified Copeland and Taylor (1999) model, where the (developed) home country's pollution abatement technology is superior to that of the (less developed) foreign country. If there is no trade, workers will migrate from the foreign country to the home country. The foreign country gains from migration, but whether the home country gains or not depends on the abatement‐technology gap and the magnitude of the coefficient of transboundary pollution. World welfare will increase under migration. If there is free trade in goods, international migration occurs when the home country specializes in the production of the environmentally sensitive good. In this case, migration will result in increased production of the manufactured good and increase the level of world pollution.     

International immigration and economic welfare in an efficiency wage model: The co-existence case of both legal and illegal foreign workers

Abstract. In the developed countries some native workers are unemployed while there exist illegal unskilled (legal skilled) foreign workers who are complementary to (substitutable for) natives and their wages are usually lower than (equal to) that of natives. Reflecting this situation, we introduce two types of immigrant in an efficiency wage model. It is shown that domestic government should exclude illegal foreign workers but welcome legal ones if the total number of illegal immigrants is small enough and well controlled. On the other hand, legal immigration should be restricted if the flood of illegal immigration is out of control.     

Voracity, growth, and welfare

This paper explores some implications of the comparison between feedback Nash and Stackelberg equilibria for growth and welfare in a ‘voracity’ model. We show that, as compared to the Nash equilibrium, the Stackelberg equilibrium involves a lower growth rate, while it leaves both the leaders and the followers better off, i.e., the Stackelberg equilibrium is Pareto superior to the Nash equilibrium.     

Uniqueness of equilibrium for smooth multistage concave games

Smooth, noncooperative, multistage, concave games are formulated so that a new uniqueness condition—based on the Poincaré-Hopf theorem—can be applied. The new condition is the weakest to appear in the uniqueness literature. The uniqueness subgame perfect equilibrium is obtained and examples are given.     

A decomposition of gains from trade in a differentiated oligopoly

Constructing a two-country oligopolistic model with product differentiation, this paper revisits welfare effects of free trade. The hybrid of procompetitive and variety expansion effects means that trade liberalization has definite benefits for the consumer, while it is contingent whether it is beneficial to oligopolistic firms and national welfare. We illustrate how these two effects interactively affect the possibility of gains from trade with simple diagrams.