WHY DO MANDATED INTERNATIONAL JOINT VENTURES STILL EXIST?

It is widely believed that restrictions against foreign direct investment (FDI) should be eliminated altogether. However, local equity requirements (LERs) that effectively mandate multinational enterprises (MNEs) to enter through international joint ventures (IJVs) are still common and are seemingly persistent. We seek to understand why and how governments are motivated to adopt LERs. We demonstrate that LERs can in fact be host governments' optimal choices when regulating the entry of MNEs into domestic markets formerly dominated by public firms. (JEL F13, F23, L32)     

Investigating Collaborative R&D Using Patent Data: The Case Study of Robot Technology in Japan

The growing trend of collaborative R&D initiated by firms has been well documented. However, the evidences regarding basic questions such as the benefits of collaboration and the motives of firms are still mixed. The main novelty of this paper is to investigate these questions by using comprehensive patent data with a focus on information concerning inventors. We consider the case of robot technology in Japan since early 1990s and get the following results. First, collaboration with external research partners lead to a higher quality of the invention. Second, the determinants and motives, which encourage firms to engage in collaborative research, differ depending on the partner they are collaborating with. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The use of Japanese land use maps at 1:25 000

This article describes a project analysing Japanese 1:25 000 land use maps and digital data derived from them, and the usefulness of such information for both planners and ordinary citizens. The maps, which began to be produced in Japan in 1975, cover most of the country's populated area and show some 40 land uses. The author has so far transferred over 100 of them into digital data which can be stored and quantified on a computer; sample analyses are provided here for 17 cities. The author concludes that if the maps can be produced in a short time and updated regularly, they can play an important role in land-use studies and planning in Japan. Further quantification, with the support of the Geographical Survey Institute, would be useful.     

BLOCKS: Efficient and Stable Online Visualization of Dynamic Network Evolution

It is computationally and cognitively expensive to observe the evolution of community structure on dynamic networks in real-time, not only because the data sets tend to be complex, but also because the visual interfaces are often complicated. We introduce BLOCKS, a simple but efficient framework to abstract and visualize the evolution of community structure on dynamic networks. Instead of indicating detailed changes of nodes and links temporally, BLOCKS regards communities as visual entities and focuses on representing their behaviors and relation changes on a time series. Experiments detected a stable performance of BLOCKS compared with previous methods while detecting the community structure of networks. We also present a case study that shows an effective learning process of network evolution with BLOCKS.     

Another Look at the Underlying Cause of the End of the Bretton Woods System: International Price Differences Perspective

In this study, the sustainability of the Bretton Woods system from the standpoint of purchasing power parity is discussed. The paper uses wholesale price indexes of the group of seven industrialized countries (G‐7) and examines when persistent price disparities among the countries occurred by applying the panel unit root tests. It is found that the price indexes of G‐7 countries began to diverge in the first half of the 1960s. Evidence from international price differences suggests that the price indexes may have signaled the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system before the inflation rate in the USA accelerated.     

Graph-Based Entropy for Detecting Explanatory Signs of Changes in Market

Graph-based entropy, an index of the diversity of events in their distribution to parts of a co-occurrence graph, is proposed for detecting signs of structural changes in the data that are informative in explaining latent dynamics of consumers’ behavior. For obtaining graph-based entropy, connected sub-graphs are first obtained from the graph of co-occurrences of items in the data. Then, the distribution of items occurring in events in the data to these sub-graphs is reflected on the value of graph-based entropy. For the data on the position of sale, a change in this value is regarded as a sign of the appearance, the separation, the disappearance, or the uniting of consumers’ interests. These phenomena are regarded as the signs of dynamic changes in consumers’ behavior that may be the effects of external events and information. Experiments show that graph-based entropy outperforms baseline methods that can be used for change detection, in explaining substantial changes and their signs in consumers’ preference of items in supermarket stores.