MATCHING FUNCTION FOR THE JAPANESE LABOUR MARKET: RANDOM OR STOCK–FLOW?

This paper estimates outflow equations for the unemployed and job vacancies under random and stock–flow matching using Japanese data. We find that for the outflow of the unemployed, the stock–flow matching model fits better than the random matching model at the quarterly frequency, but not at the monthly frequency. In contrast, the outflow of vacancies is affected by the stock of the unemployed as well as its inflow at both monthly and quarterly frequencies. In addition, we calculate the exit rates of the unemployed and job vacancies to show the relationship between the exit rates and the durations of unemployment and job vacancies.     

Employment and hours of work

This paper develops a dynamic model of the labor market in which the degree of substitution between employment and hours of work is determined as part of a search equilibrium. Each firm chooses its demand for working hours and number of vacancies, and the earnings profile is determined by Nash bargaining. The earnings profile is generally nonlinear in hours of work, and defines the trade-off between employment and hours of work. Concave production technology induces firms to overemploy and, as a result, hours of work are below their optimal level. The Hosios condition is not sufficient for efficiency. When there are two industries, workers employed by firms with higher recruitment costs work longer and earn more. That is, “good jobs” require longer hours of work. Interestingly, technology differentials cannot account for working hours differentials.     

Market Price Response of World Rice Research

Using the total number of research publications as a proxy, the output of rice research in the world is estimated to be highly responsive in the short run to price fluctuations in the international rice market. The results suggest a danger of the inducement mechanism of public investment in the agricultural production infrastructure being misguided by cyclical price changes, thereby leading to recurrent food shortages and oversupplies in a cobweb-like manner.     

The role of foreign direct investment in Indonesia's manufacturing exports

This article examines whether foreign direct investment (FDI) has contributed to the changing structure of Indonesia's manufacturing exports. It uses industry-level data from 1990 to 2008, classified by factor intensity. Our analysis reveals that FDI promotes exports in most panel observations, especially exports from physical-capital-intensive (PCI), human-capital-intensive (HCI) and technology-intensive (TI) industries. Yet by applying a differentiated cross-section-effect model, we determine that the export-generating potential of FDI is stronger in PCI, HCI and TI industries than in natural-resource-intensive or unskilled-labour-intensive industries, in which Indonesia has a comparative advantage. We also assess the influence of other determinants of export performance – namely, private domestic capital investment, GDP growth and exchange rates. Our findings have implications for policymakers seeking to sustain Indonesia's export performance.     

Income and Employment Generation from Agricultural Processing and Marketing: The Case of Soybean in Indonesia

This study aims to illustrate the potential of agricultural processing and marketing activities in generating local income and employment in developing economies, using soybean in Indonesia as a case. The results show that those activities add to rural income and employment at a scale equal or even larger than those generated from farm production itself, indicating their role in alleviating poverty and inequality in the rural sector.     

The Relationship Between Bank Risk and Earnings Management: Evidence from Japan

Using stock price data drawn from the 1990s in Japan, this paper empirically shows that bank risk is negatively associated with discretionary accruals, indicating that investors misinterpreted high reported earnings as favorable information about bank financial health. We also show that the negative relationship was very powerful prior to the major bank failures in late 1997 and 1998, but it diminished subsequent to the failures. We conclude that investors started to anticipate potential manipulation of financial reports by bank managers more rationally after the major bank failures.     

面向21世纪的丰桥市

丰桥市概况 丰桥市位于日本中部,拥有丰富的自然景观,气候温和。基于 Ｔｏｋａｉｄｏ Ｓｈｉｋａｎｓｅｎ快速铁路干线和 Ｔｏｍｅｉ高速公路提供的便利的交通条件,使得丰桥市的农业、制造业和服务业得到快速而协调的发展。全市拥有人口 ３６万,是Ａｉｃｈｉ县第二大城市。 追溯丰桥市的历史,史家考证大约在１０万年以前就有Ｃｒｏｍａｇｎｕｓ人在这里活动。从这点看来,丰桥市具有悠久的历史。在Ｅ－ｄｏ时期（１６０３～１８６７）,丰桥市成为一个繁忙的避居地和理想的留宿地。到Ｅｄｏ末期,丰桥成为著名的“Ｅｉｊｙａｎａｉｋａ…     

Business cycle accounting for the Japanese economy

We conducted business cycle accounting (BCA) using the method developed by Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (Chari, V.V., P.J. Kehoe, E.R. McGrattan, 2002a. Accounting for the Great Depression. Am. Econ. Rev. 92 (2), 22–27) on data from the 1980s to 1990s in Japan and from the interwar period in Japan and the United States. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we find that labor wedges may have been a major contributor to the decade-long recession in the 1990s in Japan. Assuming exogenous variations in the share of labor, we find that the deterioration in the labor wedge started around 1990, which coincides with the onset of the recession. Second, we performed an alternative BCA exercise using the capital wedge instead of the investment wedge to check the robustness of BCA implications for financial frictions. The accounting results with the capital wedge imply that financial frictions may have had a large depressive effect during the 1930s in the United States. This implication is the opposite of that from the original BCA findings.