Some aspects on regional integration,comparative advantage and consumer's diversity

This article describes one simple Cournot oligopoly model with linear inverse demand and international linkage, and tries to analyse how the degree of competitiveness, the diversity in comparative advantage, consumer preference and market volume are closely interrelated with each other in the course of free trade areas (FTA) liberalization. The influence of income/substitution effects to firm's profit maximization is also examined. My analysis shows some basic results and implications regarding the tariff-setting strategies and the incentive for endogenous internal liberalization, as well as the role of FTA formation on a stream to world-wide liberalization.     

Network motifs in an inter-firm network

Firms build business relationships during economic activities. The goal of this paper is to clarify production mechanisms and economic functions by identifying characteristic patterns of inter-firm interactions. In this paper, we empirically analyze an inter-firm network consisting of about one million firms and four million directed links, in order to specify network motifs, which are small subgraphs that occur more frequently than expected in a randomly generated network. We found that V-shaped triads are network motifs, while feedforward and feedback loop are anti-motifs. By defining roles in the subgraph according to structural equivalence, we also detected the significance profile of roles characterizing the industry sector. The taxonomy of industries obtained from the profiles is economically meaningful. These empirical findings may serve to provide an easily interpretable view of the entire inter-firm network and to improve the efficiency and safety of economic systems.     

Dynamics of quote and deal prices in the foreign exchange market

We empirically investigate price fluctuations of yen-dollar exchange rate using the high-frequency data recorded in the electronic broking system for seven-year period. The distribution of quote price changes has symmetric fat-tails approximated by a power law; however, that of deal price is asymmetrical. The autocorrelation function and diffusion of price changes indicate that quote price exhibits anti-correlation feature in short time scale, whereas deal price is essentially uncorrelated. The bid-ask spread shows power-law distribution and long range temporal correlations similar to that observed in absoute price changes.      

Random walk or a run. Market microstructure analysis of foreign exchange rate movements based on conditional probability

Using tick-by-tick data for the dollar–yen and euro–dollar exchange rates recorded on the actual transaction platform, a ‘run’—continuous increases or decreases in deal prices for the past several ticks—does have some predictable information on the direction of the next price movement. Deal price movements, that are consistent with order flows, tend to continue a run once it is started. Indeed, conditional probabilities of a run continuing in the same direction after several consecutive observations exceed 0.5. However, quote prices do not show such a run tendency. Hence, a random walk hypothesis is refuted in a simple test of a run using tick-by-tick data. In addition, a longer continuous increase of the price tends to be followed by a larger reversal. The findings suggest that those market participants who have access to real-time, tick-by-tick transaction data may have an advantage in predicting exchange rate movements. The findings reported here also lend support to the momentum trading strategy.     

Directional imbalance in transport prices and economic geography

This paper examines how and why transport prices become imbalanced with respect to the direction of shipments and how this affects economic geography. It is shown that the equilibrium transport price of the shipment in a particular direction is a nondecreasing function of the relative size of the embarkation region. Furthermore, we show that the directional imbalance in transport prices increases the likelihood of the symmetric pattern being stable and decreases the likelihood of the core-periphery patterns being sustainable. In short, the imbalance acts as a dispersion force.     

Occupational choice and entrepreneurship: effects of R&D subsidies on economic growth

Most R&D-based growth models fail to explicitly account for the role of entrepreneurs in economic growth. By contrast, this study accounts for this factor and constructs an overlapping-generations model that includes entrepreneurial innovation and the occupational choice of becoming an entrepreneur or a worker. For the role of entrepreneurs, even a policy intended to encourage innovation can negatively affect economic growth. For the effect of such policies, I focus on the role of R&D subsidies. I show that while R&D subsidies promote entrepreneurs’ R&D activities, they increase workers’ wages by boosting labor demand. Thus, it is more attractive to be a worker, which reduces the number of entrepreneurs. Subsidies can have both a negative and positive effect on growth, which results in an inverted U-shaped relationship between R&D subsidies and growth. In addition, a growth-maximizing R&D subsidy rate exists, although this rate is too high to maximize the welfare level of any one generation. When individuals are heterogeneous in their abilities, R&D subsidies reduce intra-generational inequalities.