This paper examines researchers' choices between either collaborating with venture capitalists (Regime C) or going independently (Regime I), and how their interaction affects long-run endogenous growth, in an economy characterized by incomplete contracts and financial market imperfections. Both research and production require labor and physical capital. We find that an improvement in financial regulation leads to a higher rate of innovation under Regime I. In contrast, an improvement in R&D incentives for researchers in Regime C can coincide with either an increase or a decrease in the long-run rate of innovation, due to the holdup problem in post bargaining over created value. We also rank the growth rates in the two regimes under different contractual and financial environments. Finally, we find that conflicts can arise when entrepreneurs choose one regime based on investment incentives but the other regime provides a higher growth rate.

In this investigation, tests were performed to determine whether mortality cycles are asymmetric. Results from an asymmetry test of U.S. time-series data from 1951 to 2005 provide no evidence that all-cause mortality or mortality caused by disease causes asymmetric cycles. However, the rate of fatalities from suicide exhibits the pattern of an asymmetric cycle. The evidence for asymmetric suicide cycles is statistically significant for men and working-age groups but not for women and non-working-age groups.

This paper examines the 'flying geese' patterns of industrial development in which a series of industries take off one after another. This paper first shows theoretically that the 'flying geese' patterns of industrial development are consistent with the multiple-cone version of the Heckscher--Ohlin (HO) model. The paper then examines empirically how the multiple-cone HO model fits the 'flying geese' patterns of industrial development. Using Japanese manufacturing data, the empirical analysis shows that the multiple-cone model fits well with the 'flying geese' patterns of Japanese industrial development. The results imply that industry upgrading may be an important mechanism behind economic growth.

In this note, we incorporate capital accumulation into Zhu ("An overlapping generations model with search", Journal of Economic Theory 2008). We show that the Friedman rule may not be optimal. Intergenerational monetary transfer between young and old is too high under the Friedman rule. The deviation from the rule lowers the utility at the decentralized market, but the welfare loss is　dominated by the welfare gain through the reduction of the intergenerational transfer. We also show that monetary policy is not neutral and inflation lowers the real interest rate.

This paper applies the career concerns model of policy-making to a political economy of fiscal federalism and examines the relative efficiency of decentralization over centralization. Decentralization leads policy-makers to make more effort owing to the forces of yardstick competition, while centralization takes more advantage of internalizing technological externality owing to policy-makers' coordinated action. The equilibrium effort levels may be excessive depending on the outside valuation of policy-makers' talent, however. As a result, not only the size of technological externality but also the outside valuation of policy-makers' talent affects the relative efficiency between centralization and decentralization. There occur some cases in which partial integration of regions is more efficient.

Geographical distribution of medical doctors is a hotly debated issue in the medical community and in public policy on health care. One of the problems is that many hospitals, especially those in rural areas, do not attract sufficient numbers of medical residents to meet their demands. Previous literature on stable matching suggests that a solution is elusive, as the rural hospital theorem (Roth 1986) implies that any hospital that fails to fill all its positions in one stable matching is matched to an identical set of doctors in all stable matchings.
　The shortage of residents in rural hospitals is pronounced in Japan, where the deferred acceptance algorithm (Gale and Shapley 1962) has placed over 8,000 residents to about 1,000 each year. In an attempt to increase the placement of residents to rural hospitals, Japanese government recently introduced “regional caps” which, for each of 47 prefectures of the country, restrict the total number of students matched within the prefecture.
　This paper shows that the current mechanism with regional caps may result in avoidable inefficiency and instability and proposes a class of mechanisms that improve efficiency and generate stable matchings while meeting the regional caps.
　More specifically, we first introduce concepts of stability and constrained efficiency that take regional caps into account. We observe that the current Japanese mechanism does not always produce a stable or constrained efficient matching. We characterize the set of stable matchings in the presence of regional caps and present an algorithm that finds a stable and constrained efficient matching. We show that the mechanism is strategy-proof for doctors. These results suggest a potentially superior mechanism than the current one when the government needs to achieve certain distributional goals. We also find that the set of stable matchings exhibit structural properties different from those in the standard matching problems. Firstly, there does not necessarily exist a doctor-optimal matching (matching unanimously preferred by all doctors). Second, different stable matchings can have different sets of hospitals with vacant positions, implying that the rural hospital theorem fails in our context. Thus there may be room for government to select a particular stable matching based on its welfare and distributional goals.

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of the change in unemployment insurance benefits in three general equilibrium incomplete market models. In particular, it decomposes the total effect for each individual into different factors. In all of the models that I consider, the consumers face an uninsurable unemployment risk, can save in an interest-bearing asset, and face a borrowing constraint. I find that (i) in the models that are calibrated to the U.S. economy, the welfare benefit of having access to unemployment insurance above the current U.S. level is very limited, (ii) the changes in equilibrium prices tend to create a conflict of interest between poor and rich consumers, (iii) considering the endogenous reaction of the equilibrium unemployment rate to unemployment insurance benefit is important when considering the welfare effect of the change in equilibrium prices, and (iv) an unanticipated change in unemployment insurance benefits involves implicit transfers. Details of the model matter substantially in shaping the total welfare outcome, both through the direct effect on individuals and through the general equilibrium effect.

This paper examines the relationship between malpractice pressure and preventable medical errors. An important objective of medical liability law is to deter medical errors by punishing negligent mistakes. However, relatively little evidence exists on the deterrence effect. Using newly constructed measures for preventable medical errors and state tort reforms between 1994 and 2007, I found evidence that higher liability pressure deters medical errors in obstetrics/gynecology procedures. Interestingly, different types of tort reforms lead to opposing effects on medical errors: collateral source rule reform and caps on punitive damages lead to increases in medical errors; joint and several liability reform, which increases the accountability of doctors, leads to decreases in some types of errors; caps on non-economic damages have little impact on medical errors. I also examined the impact of tort reforms on hospital costs, finding that higher liability pressure does not uniformly increase or decrease the costs of hospital treatments. These results suggest that the welfare effect of higher liability pressure is not uniform across different types of tort reforms, and policy makers should be aware of these differences when implementing policies that affect medical malpractice liability.

The observed decline in the relative price of investment goods in Japan suggests the existence of investment-specific technological (IST) changes. This paper examines whether IST changes are a major source of business fluctuations in Japan, by estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Bayesian methods. We show that IST changes are less important than neutral technological changes in explaining output fluctuations. We also demonstrate that investment fluctuations are mainly driven by shocks to investment adjustment costs. Such shocks represent variations of costs involved in changing investment spending, such as financial intermediation costs. We then find that the estimated investment adjustment cost shocks correlate strongly with the diffusion index of firms' financial position in the Tankan (Short-term Economic Survey of Enterprises in Japan). We thus argue that the large decline in investment growth in the early 1990s is due to an increase in investment adjustment costs stemming from firms' tight financial constraint after the collapse of Japan's asset price bubble.

This paper characterizes the decision maker whose preference over menus, i.e., sets of alternatives, is deterministic while choice of an alternative from a menu is stochastic. A key idea of this paper is to consider correlated mixtures of menus by introducing the emotional ranking, which differs from the commitment ranking. Our main theorem axiomatizes an anticipated stochastic choice (ASC) representation, in which a probability measure over emotional states (or a mood function) is chosen from a certain set so that the expected utility is maximized. A special case of ASC representations is trembling hands, i.e., the best alternative is chosen from a menu with high probability while arbitrary suboptimal alternatives are chosen with positive probability. Moreover, the sets of mood functions in ASC representations are unique, thus they can be interpreted as indices of a preference for commitment to singleton menus.

To analyze the macroeconomic consequences of a systemic bank run, we integrate the banking model à la Diamond and Rajan (2001) into a variant of neoclassical business cycle models. The banking sector intermediates the collateralized loans from households to firms. The systemic bank run, which is a sunspot phenomenon in this model, results in a deep recession through causing a sudden tightening of the collateral constraint. We show that an increase in the probability of a systemic bank run causes a persistent recession and lowers the asset price, even if the systemic bank run does not actually occur.

Stringent environmental regulations are generally thought to harm export flows. This argument is crucial in determining mutual policy recommendations for environmental preservation and international competitiveness. Using bilateral trade data, we examine the relationship between trade flows and various kinds of environmental stringency indices. Our results imply that stringency could have beneficial effects on trade flows.

We explore the asymmetry between new firms (entrants) and former local monopolists (incumbents) in electric power procurement auctions. Using a structural model where auction participation is endogenous, we explore the reasons for the persistently low participation rate of entrants and the effects of preferential treatment aimed at enhancing the participation of entrants. The results indicate that entrants have a lower project cost but a higher participation cost. We find bid discounts have little effect on entrant participation and that a lump-sum subsidy to entrants is more cost effective by enhancing participation of entrants.

Best response structure of an n-person binary coordination game suggests that an equilibrium selection outcome is determined by the balance of the ordinal aspects and the cardinal aspects of the game. This intuition inspires new equilibrium selection results for that class of games under the adaptive play with mistakes. Detailed comparison of the adaptive play and the single population random matching model is made possible by these results. It turns out that stochastic stability in the adaptive play depends sharply on details of the ordinal, pure strategy best response structure that are indiscernible to the single population random matching model.

We formulate a two-country, continuum-good Ricardian model of trade and endogenous growth with endogenous trade status. After establishing the existence, uniqueness, and global stability of a balanced growth path, we show that, compared with the old balanced growth path, a permanent fall in the trade cost in any one country: (i) raises the growth rates of capital in all countries for all periods; (ii) increases both the range of the imported varieties and that of the exported varieties in all countries for all periods; and (iii) raises welfare in all countries.

本論文では，90年代末の金融危機以降の日本企業のリストラクチャリングの進行について，法人企業統計の産業別データ・個別企業データの両方を用いて検討し，両方のデータにおいて，雇用と負債の調整の間にcomplimentalityがあることを確認した．また，資本・労働それぞれの要素移動の効率性を示す指標として，負債と人件費の成長率の産業・企業ごとのばらつきを計算し，それが各変数の経済全体での動きとどのように関係しているかを検証した．その結果，特に大企業においては，80年代までは分配の効率性が上昇すると負債・人件費ともに伸びていたのに対し，90年代末から2000年代の前半にかけては，まったく逆の相関が見られることが分かった．つまり「失われた10年」の後半以降に日本企業によるリストラクチャリングが大きく進行した局面では，資源配分の効率性の向上は，新たな資本や労働の投入を促進するよりは，過剰な生産要素の削減を加速させていたと考えられる．また個別企業のデータでは，負債の成長率（圧縮）の散らばりの大きさの方が先行して上昇しており，人件費の成長率の散らばりのピークは2000年代中盤である．さらに回帰分析によって，ROAや雇用の成長率が企業の負債の成長率に与える影響には，非対称性が存在することがわかった．ROAで測った業績がプラスのときには，企業は負債をより積極的に圧縮する傾向にあり，逆にマイナスのとき負債を増やす傾向は極めて限定的である．同じように，人件費で測った雇用の成長率がプラスの場合には負債の増加傾向は明白だが，減少に伴う負債の圧縮はさほど目立たない．

Our objective is to analyze the effectiveness, against the illegal disposal of waste, of a licensing system that has been introduced in a waste management policy. We theoretically find enforcement leverage in the licensing system, then examine the theoretical result empirically in a three-stage estimation. The results in the final stage of our estimation suggest that extending liability to disposers, which forms the basis of the enforcement leverage, deters illegal disposal more effectively than increasing penalties for illegal disposal. We also obtain evidence (in the first stage) of transboundary movement of illegal disposal, and find (in the second stage) how the court determines penalties for illegal disposal.

This paper shows that green policies can harm the environment. In particular, it is demostrated that subsidies for biofuel production will generate supply-side effects by fossil fuel producers that could more than offset the substitution to biofuels, resulting in a higher path of accumulated carbon dioxide emissions in the short term and medium term (and possibly also in the long run). Analytical results are derived and numerical simulations show that, under a wide range of parameter values, biofuel subsidies will lead to a more rapid extraction profile, bringing climate change damages closer to the present.

本稿は1989 年のバブルの崩壊と2007 年のサブプライム危機によって引き起こされ たリスクの流入による日本金融津波と米国金融津波に関する2 つの仮説AB を再検 証した。再検証の結果、修正仮説A すなわち金融産業に危機が発生して、リスクが 非金融産業に浸入して不況に陥れ双方向でリスクが浸入したという仮説と、修正仮 説B すなわち欧米に危機が発生して、欧米リスクが金融・非金融産業に同時に浸入 して不況を引き起こしたが、両産業でリスクの浸入は無いという仮説が支持された。 これらの修正仮説に従えば、現在、米国津波に対して取るべき政策は外国経済の救 済策が急務であり、同時に非金融・金融産業の救済策も必要となる。しかし、外国 リスクの量が国内リスクの量よりはるかに多いので、セフティネットを張りつつ外 国リスクが消えるのを待つ。米国津波は、日本津波とリスクの発生元も浸入経路も 異なることから、国内の金融・非金融産業に対する政策では解決できず、セフティ ネットを張ることに重点を置くべきである。

The literature remains indecisive on the relation between firm-level volatility and cycles. In response, this paper builds a simple model causes both pro- and counter-cyclicality of firm-level volatility according to environments. The key is the bankruptcy costs and heterogeneity of firms. Firms that continue business in a recession depends on the balance between variable cost and fixed cost of bankruptcy. So, the behavior of average firm-level volatility in business cycles also depends on it. The paper also examines some welfare implication about bankruptcy cost.

This paper explores the outcome of the noncooperative environmental decision-making under transnational externalities when the national policies are chosen by the elected politicians. Specifically, we re-examine the extent of a voter's incentives for supporting politicians who are less green than she is, a phenomenon called ``political race to the bottom''. The median voter (principal) strategically appoints his delegate (agent) who independently decides the level of environmental investments (as inputs for the global public good) which generate transnational benefits. The new feature of our model is the introduction of complementarity between public inputs, while previous studies supposed perfect substitution. Our analysis derives some new results. The extent of ``political race to the bottom" diminishes as public inputs become more complementary, and if its degree exceeds a certain point, ``political race to the top" emerges, without supposing effects of other factors including international trade. We further examine the case with perfect substitution. Equilibrium is in fact asymmetric. Although one of the elected politicians pays no attention to the environment, the other country results in self-representation.

This paper examines the effects of international transfer on pollution permits which are determined non-cooperatively by a donor and a recipient. First we show that the untied international transfer decreases the pollution permit of the recipient, and may be welfare-improving for both countries if pollution is transboundary. Secondly, we introduce a full-compensatory emission-contingent transfer and show that it may reduce the emission of pollution in the recipient country and may increase the welfare of the donor while keeping the recipient’s welfare constant.