The Economic Impact of Herd Behavior in the Japanese Loan Market

This paper investigates whether inefficient herd behavior of Japanese financial institutions in the domestic loan market affected the real economy during the period between 1975 and 1999. By using Japanese loan data, arranged by geographical area, we show that loans stemming from inefficient herd behavior of Japanese financial institutions tended to have destabilizing effects on the GDP and land prices in the following years, while ordinary loans of those financial institutions had a more positive impact. Our results indicate that the deterioration of the real economy in the 1990s may have been attributable partly to the inefficient herd behavior in the Japanese loan market during the period of the economic bubble in the late 1980s.     

Food Processing Business and Agriculture Cooperatives in Japan: Market Power and Asymmetric Information*

Food processing businesses run by agriculture cooperatives (in this paper referred to as food processing cooperatives) are basically firms that are owned by the suppliers of raw materials. Typically, in this type of firm, corporate decision‐making is the responsibility of member farmers through the one member one–vote rule, and the surplus of the business is divided among them according to the amount of raw agricultural products they have supplied to the firm. This is in contrast to a conventional capitalistic firm, in which corporate decision‐making is ultimately made by the stockholders through the one share–one vote rule, and the profit is divided among them according to the amount of financial capital they have supplied to the firm. Based upon statistical data and case studies, the present paper considers some economic factors that might influence the establishment of food processing cooperatives.     

Asymmetric technological distance measure based on language model

This article introduces a novel technological distance measure between companies based on their patent portfolios. We describe the technological position or characteristics of companies by applying the framework of language modelling technique in information retrieval on their patent portfolios. The proposed novel approach is an asymmetric measure and better captures the technological characteristic of a company and hence is a more accurate distance measure.     

日本经济起飞时期农村劳动力供给机制研究

20世纪60年代,伴随着日本经济起飞,城市加工产业对劳动力的需求急剧扩大,在城乡巨大收入差距的诱惑下,日本农村的青壮年劳动力大量涌入城市,造成农村劳动力严重短缺,在农户家庭内部劳动力互补机制的作用下,缓解了劳动力不足,在一定程度上稳定了农业生产。从分析日本经济起飞时期农村劳动力的结构变动入手,通过实证分析把握劳动力供给结构变化的经济影响;进而分析未来日本劳动力供给结构变化的趋势,在此基础上结合中国的实际情况说明农村劳动力互补机制对于城市化进程中中国农村的借鉴意义。     

Trading profitability from learning and adaptation on the Tokyo Stock Exchange

This study proposes unexamined technical trading rules, which are dynamically switching strategies among filter, moving average and trading-range breakout rules. The dynamically switching strategy is formulated based on a discrete choice theory consistent with the concept of myopic utility maximization. We utilize the transaction data of the individual stocks listed on the Nikkei 225 from September 1, 2005 to August 31, 2007. We demonstrate that switching strategies produce positive returns and their performance is better than those from the buy-and-hold and non-switching strategies over our sample periods. We also demonstrate equivalent performance for switching with different learning horizons, implying that behavioural heterogeneity of stock investors arises from the coexistence of different strategies with varying degrees of learning horizons. Our result supports several research assumptions and results on agent-based theoretical models that successfully replicate empirical features in financial markets, such as fat tails of return distributions and volatility clustering. However, upon considering the effects of data-snooping bias superior performance disappears.     

Long run equilibria in an asymmetric oligopoly

Summary. Consider an oligopolistic industry composed of two groups (or populations) of firms, the low cost firms and the high cost firms. The firms produce a homogeneous good. I study the finite population evolutionarily stable strategy defined by Schaffer (1988), and the long run equilibrium in the stochastic evolutionary dynamics based on imitation and experimentation of strategies by firms in each group. I will show the following results. 1) The finite population evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) output is equal to the competitive (or Walrasian) output in each group of the firms. 2) Under the assumption that the marginal cost is increasing, the ESS state is the long run equilibrium in the stochastic evolutionary dynamics in the limit as the output grid step, which will be defined in the paper, approaches to zero. Received: September 19, 1997; revised: June 18, 1998     

A topological approach to Wilson’s impossibility theorem

We will present a topological approach to Wilson’s impossibility theorem [Wilson, R.B., 1972. Social choice theory without the Pareto principle. Journal of Economic Theory 5, 478–486] that there exists no non-null binary social choice rule which satisfies transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, non-imposition and has no dictator nor inverse dictator. Our research is in line with the studies of topological approaches to discrete social choice problems initiated by [Baryshnikov, Y., 1993. Unifying impossibility theorems: a topological approach. Advances in Applied Mathematics 14, 404–415]. This paper extends the result about the Arrow impossibility theorem shown in [Tanaka, Y., 2006. A topological approach to the Arrow impossibility theorem when individual preferences are weak orders. Applied Mathematics and Computation 174, 961–981] to Wilson’s theorem.     

Vertical foreign direct investment: Evidence from Japanese and U.S. multinational enterprises

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries has increased since the 1990s, but there is mixed evidence of vertical FDI associated with factor-seeking motives. This paper estimates the vertical motive of offshore production by multinational enterprises (MNEs) by exploiting past schooling characteristics as instruments for skilled-labor abundance in a host country. Using panel data on Japanese and U.S. MNEs in the 1990s, I find that skilled-labor abundance has a significantly negative impact on sales of manufacturing foreign affiliate only for Japanese MNEs. The results suggest that vertical FDI activity was more prevalent in Japanese MNEs than U.S. MNEs. A plausible explanation is that Japanese MNEs might be more vertically integrated with their offshore production than U.S. MNEs. A difference in foreign outsourcing activities could generate the observed deviation between Japanese and U.S. MNEs.