Project details : 2014

The aim of this study is to analyze the determinants of giving birth for women in Russia after economic transition. By using forms returned from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, the effects of micro-level (individual or household level) factors such as division of labor in the households, labor market, property holdings etc. on decision to give birth was analyzed from the viewpoints of population economics, labor economics and sociology.

At the kick-off meeting in Matsuyama on June 2014, we discussed about the research topics relating Hungarian public pension system and confirmed individual subjects. After that, we did our research separately. At the workshop on 22 February 2015, we presented our achievements. We pointed that not only the reform design but also low performance of 2nd pillar caused the failure of partial privatization and that by the recent re-nationalization sustainability of the system has not been secured. And focusing not only monetary but also non-monetary intergenerational transfers, we also insisted that we should reexamine the role of  public pension system taking such factors into account.

Based on the individual statistical records Economic Census and other censuses and surveys following issues were investigated:

(1)possible impacts of locational factors like concentration of local units on their business performances.

(2)direction and intensity of managers’ business mind in the course of business cycle.

(3)impact of locational factors on retail trades.

This research conducts an empirical analysis of the influence of companies’ financial condition and business sentiment on wage structure. The analysis is conducted using linked data created from official microdata from the “Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities”, the “Basic Survey of Wage Structure”, and the “2009 Economic Census for Business Frame”. The results show that when profit rates such as return on assets and net income to sales ratio are higher, i.e. corporate performance and corporate financial condition are better, wages tend to increase. Partial results of this research were presented at the fiscal year 2014 workshop ‘Actual Situation of the Social Economy Based on Microdata’ which was held at Hitotsubashi University in March 2015, and will be published as a “Discussion Paper” by the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University and in other publications.

We asked a paper on statistics on DPRK to Academy of Social Sciences in North Korea. And We received the paper in March 2015. Thesis of the title is “Main statistics in North Korea and comparison with SNA”.We will translate this paper in Japanese and publish in Discussion Paper in IER.

To improve young economists’ skills in conducting research in an international research community, we organized two events: (1) the presentation master class and (2) the mentoring workshop for young female economists. For both events, we invited Professor Terra McKinnish, who has actively participated in CeMENT in the American Economic Association, to share her experiences in research and mentoring. Some of the co-investigators presented their work at an international conference.

This joint work kicked off a new round of empirical work to examine the relative patterns of factor growth and TFP performance in India relative to China. It also interpreted the results based on the literature of macroeconomic changes, policy regime shifts and external shocks. It shows that heavy industries in India, especially capital-intensive, were much more productive than their Chinese counterparts at the earlier reform period, but declined as the Chinese caught up along with deepening reforms and opening up to FDI and trade post WTO. For most labor-intensive industries, despite the Chinese enjoyed high growth in trade and FDI, the Indian manufacturing maintained higher and increasing productivity performance even after China’s WTO entry. India’s existing market institutions and long established links with western technology and managerial skills may be able to explain why Indians are more productive in labor-intensive and export-oriented industries despite Chinese firms receive much stronger policy support.

On the basis of quick review of past estimation results and search for new statistical sources, have established a strategy for building historical IO tables or early modern Japan at, say, around 1906, 1926, and 1935, with the direct estimation of aij's, which shall be combined with final demand figures and intermediate totals derived from the data available in LTES (by Ohkawa ct al). In this connection, we shall endeavour to adopt [a] as detailed classification as possible of the primary industry. [b] appropriate food balance tables, [c] new official statistical sources for the secondary industry, and [d] a new estimation method for the activities of the tertiary industry.

Katsuo Kogure (IER), Chiaki Moriguchi (IER)  

A working paper for the project is drafted. Historical analysis suggests that the quality of mapping was different across countries due to path dependence in military mapping. Quantitative analysis indicates that the differences in mapping impact the institutional quality in property rights, resulting differential economic consequences across countries.

We have completed an investigation of the presence of seniority wages by comparing wages of regular workers who change jobs with those who do not.   The wages are derived from the Japanese Longitudinal Survey on Employment and Fertility (LOSEF) conducted in 2011. Stochastic dominance analysis is used to compare the wage distributions of Japanese male lifetime workers with other regular workers from 1970 to 2011.

The joint research at Hitotsubashi University and NISTEP allowed us to deliver two  working papers (see under 2.)

In the first paper we aim to answer the question whether high or low productivity firms self-select into locations characterized by high industry establishment density.  On the one hand, productive firms may benefit more from the presence of specialized suppliers in agglomerated areas and they are also more likely to survive heightened product market competition. On the other hand, productive firms face greater risks of knowledge dissipation to collocated rival firms and contribute more than they receive in terms of knowledge spillovers. We analyze data on the location of new plant establishments by multi-plant manufacturing firms in Japan, relating location decisions to firms’ prior productivity in existing plants. Estimating conditional logit models of location choice for close to 3,666 plant location decisions (2002-2008) covering more than 1,000 towns, wards, and cities, we find that the adverse selection effects of industry agglomeration dominate. These effects are substantially stronger if there is no association between establishment density and local competition: if incumbent plants are exporting or if the investing firm or new plant entry focuses on export markets. We conclude that sorting processes do occur, but that these can only be uncovered in a more fine-grained analysis that takes into account ex ante measures of firm heterogeneity and the nature of product markets.

In the second working paper we focus on buyer—supplier linkages in Japanese manufacturing industries and their role in enhancing R&D spillovers between firms. We examine R&D spillovers that result from buyer and supplier relationships at the transaction level, utilizing a unique dataset identifying individual buyers and suppliers of Japanese manufacturing firms, matched with data from R&D surveys and the Census of Manufactures. In an analysis of more than 20,000 Japanese manufacturing plants, we find that R&D stocks of buyers and suppliers provide a substantial productivity performance premium over and above the effect of technologically and geographically proximate R&D stocks. These effects are magnified if the supplier and buyer have business group ties based on capital ownership relationships. While the effects of technologically proximate R&D decay with distance, this is not the case for spillovers from buyers and suppliers. Our results identify transaction-based spillovers as a key influence on productivity and social returns to R&D.

We examine the effects of after-school care on female labor supply of those who are bringing up school-aged children. We find that provision of after-school care have the positive effects on female labor supply, especially as regular workers.

Another study attempts to reveal how the redistributive effects of tax rates and deduction s are different among age-groups. It is found that expansion of tax deductions carried out in the late 1980s had effects only on elderly people, but not on young people.