Japanese Rice Market Liberalization: A Competitive Equilibrium Approach

This paper quantifies the effect of Japanese rice imports on the Japanese rice market with special attention to the farmland market in the year 2000, based on information available in 1997. Tariff and quota policies do not affect the equilibrium price of rice and rent significantly, given the current acreage controls. The removal of the acreage control programme would reduce the autarky price of rice by 30%. With free importation of rice into Japan, the price of rice would be halved, and the potential increase in the consumer surplus could be 0.3% of the 1995 Japanese GDP.
JEL Classification Numbers: F14, Q17, Q18.     

Japan’s output gap estimation and ℓ 1 trend filtering

This paper estimates Japan’s output gap using the recently developed ? ₁ trend filter, which is an alternative to the popular Hodrick–Prescott (HP) filter. This new filter provides a piecewise linear trend line, which means it possibly provides better output gap estimates than the HP filter does for an economy such as Japan that has experienced some structural breaks.     

Failure Discrimination and Rating of Enterprises by Semi-Definite Programming

We propose a new method forfailure discrimination and rating of enterprises using financialdata compiled from their balance sheets. No particular distributional assumption is made on the underlying data. Our method automatically discriminates and rates many enterprises using mathematical programming methods. We separate multi-dimensional data byhyperplane and hyper-ellipsoid, so that we can interpretthe results of classification from the geometric point of view. Theproblem to be solved here is a linear programming problem orsemi-definite programming problem which can be solved efficiently byinterior point algorithms. Numerical simulations usingreal data show that hyper-ellipsoid separation generates a result which can be used for practical purposes.