Interregional Fertility Differentials and Agglomeration

In this study, we construct an interregional trade model that includes endogenous fertility rates. The presented model shows that the agglomeration of manufacturing firms in a large region causes fertility rates to become lower than in a small region. We also find that a decrease in transportation costs results in the agglomeration of manufacturing firms, which lowers fertility rates in both large and small regions. In addition, comparing the competitive equilibrium with the optimal equilibrium, the fertility rates may be inefficiently small.     

Integrating Smart Glasses with Question-Answering Module in Assistant Work Environment

Recently, smart glasses have been applied in the field of maintenance, with which a worker goes well during work by contacting a support operator from a remote location. The worker, however, cannot go well if the support operator is not there. To solve the issues, this paper discusses how a work system should be developed by integrating smart glasses with a question-answering module. We design the work knowledge acquired from skilled people and manuals as a workflow for when type of question, rule base for how, goal tree for why, domain ontologies, and its RDF data for what. Workers can receive answers from the question-answering module incorporated with multiple knowledge bases for four types of question. The authors conducted a demonstration experiment and found that workers could perform the work more autonomously by importing the system.     

Patentability and Knowledge Spillovers of Basic R&D

This study develops a research and development (R&D)–based growth model with basic and applied research to analyze the growth and welfare effects of two patent instruments: (i) the patentability of basic R&D and (ii) the division of profit between basic and applied researchers. We find that for the purpose of stimulating basic R&D and economic growth simultaneously, increasing the share of profit assigned to basic researchers is more effective than raising the patentability of basic R&D, which has either a negative effect or an inverted‐U effect on technological progress. However, a benevolent patent authority requires both patent instruments to achieve the socially optimal allocation in the decentralized economy.     

Task assignment under agent loss aversion

We analyze a task-assignment model in which a principal assigns a task to one of two agents depending on future states. If the agents have concave utility, the principal assigns the task to them contingent on the state. We show that if the agents are loss averse, a state-independent assignment–assigning the task to a single agent in all states–can be optimal even when the principal can write a contingent contract at no cost.     

A paradigm shift from production function to production copula: statistical description of production activity of firms

The heterogeneity of economic agents is emphasized in a new trend in macroeconomics. Accordingly, the new emerging discipline requires one to replace the production function, one of the key ideas in conventional economics, by an alternative that can take explicit account of the distribution of firms' production activities. In this paper we propose a new idea referred to as a production copula; a copula is an analytic means for modeling the dependence among variables. Such a production copula predicts the value added by firms with given capital and labor in a probabilistic way. It is thereby in sharp contrast to the production function, where the output of firms is completely deterministic. We demonstrate the empirical construction of a production copula using financial data of listed Japanese firms. Analysis of the data shows that there are significant correlations among capital, labor and value added, and confirms that the values added are too widely scattered to be represented by a production function. We employ four models for the production copula, that is trivariate versions of Frank, Gumbel and survival Clayton and non-exchangeable trivariate Gumbel. The latter was found to be the best.     

Using Nonnormal Distributions to Analyze the Relationship Between Stock Returns in Japan and the US

The Pearson distribution system is researched and applied to financial engineering (Nagahara, Financ Eng Jpn Mark 2(2):139–154 in 1995, Financ Eng Jpn Mark 3(2):121–149 in 1996, Stat Prob Lett 43:251–264 in 1999, J Time Ser Anal 24(6):721–738 in 2003, A method of fitting multivariate nonnormal distributions to financial data. Discussion paper of Institute of Social Sciences, F-2006-2, Meiji University in 2006, Asia Pac Financial Markets 15(3–4):175–184 in 2008a). And a method of fitting multivariate nonnormal distributions by using random numbers from the Pearson distribution system was developed (Nagahara, Comput Stat Data Anal 47(1):1–29 in 2004). This method uses the grid search of the parameters for the maximum likelihood. In this paper, we adopt Grid-Computing and its middleware for the parameter sweep in order to reduce the computational time and the workload of this method. In the area of the financial risk management, it is very important to analyze the relationship between stock returns in Japan and the US. We analyze the data based on the same date and the following date because Japanese stock market opens before the US stock market opens in a day. We compare these returns by means of the multivariate nonnormal distributions by using this method. And we test the international transmission of stock markets movement. Furthermore, we obtain the optimal job schedule for our computer system using the middleware in order to reduce the computational time.     

Rational bubbles and non-risk neutral investors in Japan

This paper presents a sufficient condition for not observing rational bubbles in real stock prices when investors are not risk neutral and both the real interest rate and the risk premium are time varying. If the risk premium and the real interest rate are stationary, the stationarity of the first differences of real stock prices is a sufficient condition for the absence of rational bubbles. Testing this condition with data on Japanese stock prices, we find that the hypothesis that rational bubbles existed is rejected.     

Free entry and social efficiency under vertical oligopoly

We analyze a successive vertical oligopoly model that incorporates vertical relationships between industries and demonstrate that free entry in an industry that produces a homogeneous product can lead to a socially insufficient number of firms. This is in contrast with the proevious findings that, under Cournot oligopoloy with fixed set‐up costs, level of entry in the free‐entry equilibrium is socially excessive. It has often been argued that this result can provide a justification for apparently anticompetitive entry regulations. Our finding yields an important policy implication that such a justification is not necessarily valid when vertical relationships ar taken into account.     

Have the Seeds of Japanese Teamworking Taken Root Abroad?

Whether or not the Japanese work organisation may be considered teamworking is debated, especially by European researchers. In this paper four characteristics of the Japanese work organisation are outlined. These characteristics are typical for this form of teamworking. Empirical data are presented on its transfer to China and the United Kingdom.     

The folk theorem for irreducible stochastic games with imperfect public monitoring

This paper introduces stochastic games with imperfect public signals. It provides a sufficient condition for the folk theorem when the game is irreducible, thus generalizing the results of Dutta (1995) [5] and Fudenberg, Levine, and Maskin (1994) [9]. To do this, the paper extends the concept of self-generation (Abreu, Pearce, and Stacchetti, 1990 [1]) to “return generation,” which explicitly tracks actions and incentives until the next time the state returns to its current value, and asks that players not wish to deviate given the way their continuation payoffs from the time of this return depend on the public signals that have been observed.