Selective Immigration and Ethnic Economic Achievement: Japanese Americans before World War II

This article examines the determinants of Japanese immigrant economic achievement in the continental United States before World War II. Japanese immigrants to the United States were a select group in terms of their occupational background and education relative to the Japanese population as a whole because of the restrictions imposed on Japanese immigration by both the Japanese and U.S. governments. Furthermore, the selective nature of Japanese immigration contributed to the economic achievement of Japanese Americans before World War II, when their occupational position underwent a dramatic improvement. This finding differs from the standard cultural explanation of ethnic economic achievement.     

Valuation of Mortgage-Backed Securities Based upon a Structural Approach

This paper studies the valuation of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) based upon a structural approach of several risks involving the prepayment and/or default behavior of mortgagors. For the Kariya and Kobayashi (1999) model using a time-consuming Monte-Carlosimulation, we provide an alternative semi-analytic valuation methodology closely related to solving the (Volterra type) integral equation with respectto the first hitting time density for a curved/flat boundary; consequently that enables us to calculate the MBS price faster and more precisely. Next, to capture the path-dependent prepayment behavior of the interest ratemovements we give some prepayment models based upon a two-dimensional Markov process of the interest rate and its long-run average rate. Third, we study the simultaneous assessment issue of prepayment and defaultrisks, encountered in practice.Finally we discuss the calculation of the joint probability density ofmultiple first hitting times.     

Bargaining over Managerial Contracts in Delegation Games: The Generalized Oligopolistic Case

The main purpose of this paper is to disclose the properties of the equilibrium outcomes in the differentiated‐products model with two stages: (i) owner‐shareholders negotiate managerial compensation with their managers that comprises their profits and sales (sales delegation) and (ii) they engage in their market competition. The other purpose of this paper is to study the differentiated goods model in which an owner bargains the managerial compensation with her/his manager that comprises her/his profit and her/his rival's profit (relative performance delegation). We further investigate the situation wherein the firm with sales delegation and the firm with the relative performance delegation coexist. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Price versus Quantity in a Duopolistic Market with Bargaining over Managerial Delegation Contracts

This paper studies the endogenous choices of strategic contracts in a duopoly with bargaining between the owner and manager of each firm over the content of the managerial delegation contract. We show that when the bargaining power of the manager relative to that of the owner within each firm is sufficiently high, quantity competition based on the quantity contracts chosen by the owners of both firms can be uniquely observed in the equilibrium, whereas quantity competition and price competition can be observed in the equilibrium when this relative bargaining power is sufficiently low. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transitioning to IFRS in Japan: Corporate Perceptions of Costs and Benefits

This paper examines the ongoing transition to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Japan with a particular focus on recent institutional developments and corporate concerns. While Japan has committed to the convergence of Japanese generally accepted accounting principles (J‐GAAP) with IFRS it has not as yet formally adopted IFRS. This paper reports on Japanese corporate perceptions of the likely costs and benefits of adopting and implementing IFRS using survey data collected from senior financial executives of 292 Japanese listed companies in 2013–14. Our findings reveal that Japanese companies identify a number of major areas of general concern with the adoption and implementation of IFRS. Most importantly, uncertainty regarding the interpretation of standards followed by staff training, IT systems, technical knowledge and differences between J‐GAAP and IFRS were reported as major concerns. Our survey also highlights that revenue recognition, depreciation, consolidated financial statements, financial statement presentation and the retrospective application of IFRS were viewed as key IFRS accounting issues. While the large majority of companies expected a moderate degree of benefits to arise from IFRS, substantial benefits were perceived more likely to apply to large and overseas listed companies mainly arising from improvements in the international comparability of financial statements.     

Technical change in a bubble economy: Japanese manufacturing firms in the 1990s

An important economic policy issue is to ascertain when and if technical change (TC) is driving measured growth in productivity. Was this the case for Japan during the late 1980s when a massive financial bubble was being formed? This paper addresses this question, after first further developing methods needed for this purpose. The movement of firms’ TC is of particular policy interest to Japan whose economy has been suffering from a prolonged recession for more than a decade since the burst of the bubble in 1990. In the period of time immediately prior to the burst of the bubble, our estimation results show a significant drop in technical progress. What we believe these results reflect is that Japanese manufacturing firms made excessive investments in production inputs in the years when the bubble was being formed. This excessive investment in inputs did not contribute positively to TC and hence the measured productivity and economic growth of the bubble period in the late 1980s was unsustainable.     

Environmental Management in Japan: Applications of Input–Output Analysis to the Emission of Global Warming Gases

Environmental management requires, among other things, the incorporation of environmentally friendly technologies into production processes of environmentally friendly technologies into production processes at the producer level and the adoption of energy consumption patterns which save energy use at the household level. The systemwide approach involving both technology choice and consumer preference seems particularly essential for controlling the total emission of global warming gases. CO₂ and other global warming gases, as well as certain pollution causing gases, are produced when fossil fuels are burnt; and the consumption of fossil fuels occurs in both the production and consumption of goods and services. In this paper we discuss how input–output analysis can be used to estimate the entire production and consumption of global warming gases conditional on production technology and consumer preferences. We also present estimation results and their application to some environmental management issues in Japan. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.