Multi-Sector Model of Tradable Emission Permits

This paper presents a multi-sector model of tradable emission permits, which includes oligopolistic and perfectly competitive industries. The firms in oligopolistic industries are assumed to exercise market power in the tradable permit market as well as in the product market. Specifically, we examine the effects of the initial permit allocation on the equilibrium outcomes, focusing on the interaction among these product and permit markets. It is shown that raising the number of initial permits allocated to one firm in an oligopolistic industry increases the output produced by that firm. Under certain conditions, raising a “clean” (less-polluting) firm’s share of the initial permits can lead to reductions in both the product and permit prices. We discuss criteria for the socially optimal allocation of initial permits, considering the trade-off between production inefficiency and consumer benefit.     

Spatial Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence from the Yangtze River Delta in China

This paper examines the spatial externality from foreign direct investment on domestic firms. Using Chinese firm‐level data for 2004, and after accounting for an endogeneity problem, we find that foreign firms generate a significantly positive spillover effect on the regional productivity of domestic firms in similar counties and industries. Estimating a spatial‐autoregressive model, we further show that such local spillovers could transmit to domestic firms in other counties and industries through interactions among domestic firms. However, these spatial multiplier effects decline with distance, thereby reducing the foreign direct investment spillover effects for domestic firms in distant locations.     

Are contingent jobs dead ends or stepping stones to regular jobs? Evidence from a structural estimation

The proportion of part-time, dispatch, and temporary workers has increased in many developed economies in recent years. These workers receive lower average wages and benefits, and are subject to lower employment stability. This paper analyzes the effects of initially taking such jobs on the employment careers of young workers. We build an on-and-off-the-job search model, using Japanese data to perform a structural estimation of the model parameters and simulate career paths, in order to study the effects of the initial choice of employment on the probability of having a regular job in the future and on the welfare of the worker. We find that although contingent jobs are neither stepping stones towards regular employment nor dead ends, starting a career in a contingent job has a lasting effect on the welfare of the individual in Japan.     

Dynamic analysis of innovation and international transfer of technology through licensing

This paper develops a quality-ladder type dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous innovation and technology licensing as a major source of international technology transfer in developing countries. Examining the dynamic characteristics of the model fully, we explore the short- and long-run effects of both an improvement in the probability of reaching a licensing agreement with a given effort and an increase in the license fee rate. The model shows that the former promotes innovation and technology transfers in both the long and short run, while the latter discourages them.     

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.     

Intraday technical analysis of individual stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange

This paper conducts an intraday technical analysis of individual stocks listed on the Nikkei 225. In addition to the price-based technical rules popularly examined in the literature, we uniquely propose and statistically investigate technical rules that utilize information regarding (1) the order-flow imbalance and (2) the order-book imbalance. Technical analysis using the imbalance-based trading rules is motivated by the evidence presented first in this paper that short-term returns can be predicted from the information regarding the order-flow and order-book imbalances for more than half of Nikkei 225-listed stocks. However, we demonstrate that no strategies, including limit order trading where trading signals are derived from the order-book imbalance, beat the buy-and-hold strategy within our sample. The results imply that past prices and demand/supply imbalances do not contribute to profiting in intraday trading and that non-execution and picking-off risks are too large for limit order trading to be profitable in our sample.     

On the Effects of Commodity Tax Under Free Entry Oligopoly in the Presence of Export Market

If the inverse demand function in the domestic country is concave, or it is not too convex even if it is convex, a small specific commodity tax raises the social welfare in the domestic country and lowers the welfare of the foreign consumers, and the optim- al tax for the domestic country is positive. The presence of an export market enlarges the possibility that a specific commodity tax raises the social welfare in the domestic country at the sacrifice of the welfare of the foreign consumers. [L13]     

Volatility clustering and herding agents: does it matter what they observe?

Recent agent-based models have demonstrated that agents’ herding behavior causes volatility clustering in stock markets. We examine economies where agents herd on others, yet they have limited sets of information on other agents to imitate. In particular, we conduct experiments on economies with agents with different levels of information sharing where agents can imitate: (1) the strategies of others but with an error, (2) the strategies of only a fraction of agents, or (3) the strategies of others, but update their parameters only by a proportion. In each experiment we change the likelihood that agents make errors to copy the strategy of others, the fraction of agents to herd, or the proportion of the parameter that agents update, in order to examine the effect of the different degrees of information sharing on volatility clustering. We show that volatility clustering tends to disappear when agents have limited information on the strategies of others, and agents need to imitate the strategy details of others in order to generate the clustered volatility.     

From hierarchy to hybrid: The evolving nature of inter-firm governance in China's automobile groups

Despite the rapid growth of automobile industry in China, much remains to be known about the governance structure especially the inter-firm relationship within the Chinese automobile groups. Against China's changing institutional environment and compared to the established knowledge on automobile group governance in Japan, this study provides a case analysis of the evolving nature of inter-firm relationship in one of China's major automobile groups, Tianjin Automotive Group (TAG). A top-down hierarchical administration characterizes the inter-firm relationship in TAG before 1999 due to the heavy influence of the old institutional arrangement. Over time, especially entering 2000, weakening institutional ties between the state and TAG forced the group to be more responsive to market changes and to systematically learn Japanese-style supplier management from a joint venture with Toyota Group. The paper provides rare insights into the evolution of governance structure among the emerging Chinese automobile groups and extends the institution-based view of strategy into the studies of inter-firm relationship in automobile industry.     

Testing the incentive effects in tournaments with a superstar

This paper studies the effects of the levels and the structure of prizes on the efforts of agents with heterogeneous ability in a tournament model. In particular, we examine how the presence of a highly able agent affects the effort levels of other agents as well as the effects of the total and the marginal prizes. Using panel data from the Japan Golf Tour, we estimate the effects of the presence of a superstar, and the size of the total and marginal prizes on the scores of professional golfers. We find that the presence of a superstar adversely affects the scores of the other players; that the larger the size of the total prize, the better are the scores; and that the larger the marginal prizes that players face at the end of the third round, the better the scores they achieve in the final round.