Public investment criteria under optimal nonlinear income taxation without commitment

In this study, we highlight that the incredibility of the government's commitment to a certain tax policy is a determinant of production inefficiency. We show that if the government cannot commit to a certain tax policy and if the types of taxpayers are completely separated, then the production efficiency theorem could be violated in an optimal solution. In this case, an incremental unit of public or private capital affects taxpayers' labor supply through wage rates. In a situation where public capital is more (less) complementary to labor than private capital, public investment tightens (relaxes) the incentive compatibility constraint more than private investment.     

Subsidy competition and imperfect labor markets

This study presents a two‐country model of subsidy competition for manufacturing firms under labor market imperfections. Because subsidies affect the distribution of firms, subsidies influence unemployment rates and welfare in both countries. We show that when labor market frictions are high, subsidy competition is beneficial, although subsidies under subsidy competition are inefficiently high. In the coordinated equilibrium, the supranational authority provides a subsidy to firms that equal the expected total search costs, which increases the number of firms relative to laissez‐faire and improves welfare relative to laissez‐faire and subsidy competition. Finally, we find that a rise in a country's labor market frictions raises the equilibrium subsidy rate, affects unemployment rates, and lowers welfare.     

Characterizing belief-free review-strategy equilibrium payoffs under conditional independence

This paper proposes and studies a tractable subset of Nash equilibria, belief-free review-strategy equilibria, in repeated games with private monitoring. The payoff set of this class of equilibria is characterized in the limit as the discount factor converges to one for games where players observe statistically independent signals. As an application, we develop a simple sufficient condition for the existence of asymptotically efficient equilibria, and establish a folk theorem for N-player prisoner?s dilemma. All these results are robust to a perturbation of the signal distribution, and hence remain true even under almost-independent monitoring.     

Platform Sharing in a Differentiated Duopoly

Platform sharing across manufacturers has become common practice in the automobile industry. Although platform sharing reduces the degree of product differentiation, manufacturers can reduce their procurement costs by taking advantage of the commonality of components. We investigate this trade-off through analyzing a model that incorporates manufacturer–supplier relationships into a differentiated duopoly model, and find an interesting inverse relationship between the advantage of platform sharing and manufacturers' costs to communicate with their potential suppliers. We also explore welfare consequences of the Internet trading exchanges by considering an extension that allows the manufacturers to jointly establish a business-to-business electronic marketplace.     

Economic Integration in East Asia: An International Input‐Output Analysis

To establish economic and monetary union (EMU) in East Asia, deepening regional integration through international trade is important. The economic interdependence (one of the important criteria for regional integration) study, using macro data does not reflect the indirect effects generated by interactions between different production sectors and different countries. We use the international input‐output (IIO) framework to study the economic interdependence at both macro and production sector levels. We refine the existing methods to reflect exogenous country effect and size effect of the economy. Our study suggests that establishing EMU in East Asia appears to be somewhat premature. However, we can be more optimistic for regional integration at the production sector level in East Asia when including Japan, which will create a basis for EMU in the region.     

Effects of Anticipated Fiscal Policy Shock on Macroeconomic Dynamics in Japan

This study investigates the effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic dynamics in Japan with a particular focus on the effects of anticipated fiscal policy shock and the recent policies of Abenomics. We identify anticipated fiscal policy shock by combining excess stock returns for the construction industry and the vector autoregressive model with robust sign restrictions derived from a theoretical model. The primary result is that GDP and consumption respond positively to anticipated fiscal policy shock. In addition, the result of the historical decomposition that focuses on the period of Abenomics reveals that anticipated fiscal policy shock positively contributes to consumption dynamics.     

A limit characterization of belief-free equilibrium payoffs in repeated games

The present paper studies repeated games with private monitoring, and characterizes the set of belief-free equilibrium payoffs in the limit as the discount factor approaches one and the noise on private information vanishes. Contrary to the conjecture by Ely et al. [J.C. Ely, J. Hörner, W. Olszewski, Belief-free equilibria in repeated games, Econometrica 73 (2005) 377-415], the equilibrium payoff set is computed by the same formula, no matter how many players there are. As an application of this result, a version of the folk theorem is established for N-player prisoner's dilemma games.     

Aid effectiveness,governance and public investment

In this paper, we develop a growth model in which aid finances infrastructure investment and pro-poor spending in order to analyze ways through which aid can be made more effective. We assume that the recipient countries are aid-dependent in the early phase of development and that they ultimately become independent. In the model, donors can accelerate a recipient's independence from aid by investing in infrastructure. We demonstrate that even a small increase in aid can improve aid effectiveness and that aid effectiveness depends more on the growth rate than on the efficiency of the government.     

The Invisible Multipliers of Joint-products

This paper proposes a hybrid input-output model to estimate the intermediate requirements embodied in the final disposal--such as reclamation and incineration - of non-marketable scraps and wastes from industries or households. The model is based on a mixed technology assumption in order to connect the monetary distribution of the ordinary goods and services with the physical distribution of the scraps and wastes as joint-products. Moreover, some demand-pulled invisible multipliers, in terms of the scraps and wastes, have been explored by performing a numerical simulation. From the invisible multipliers, we find the paradoxical phenomenon that the reduction in the amount of final disposal and the promotion of material recycling decreases the intermediate demand of the scraps and wastes for material recycling if there is a time-lag in the introduction of the appropriate recycling technology.