Published papers

Special issue in honor of Prpfessor Michihiro OhyamaThe Lerner paradox is the possibility that a tariff on an import good might worsen a country's terms of trade, and the Metzler paradox is the possibility that a tariff on an import good might reduce a country's import price. In a general equilibrium framework with multiple goods, this paper shows that the combination of the invertibility of the Slutsky matrix for the world economy and its similarity across countries will preclude both of the paradoxes. Also the combination of the gross-substitutes assumption for the world demand and a similarity assumption on the demand of an import country to the world will preclude the Lerner paradox. A modified similarity condition for the Slutsky matrix combined with the gross substitute for the world demand will preclude the Metzler paradox. A concept of non-surpassed diagonal is introduced to derive the result.

This study estimates the effect of import competition in the final goods market on workers’ wages in the Japanese manufacturing sector by constructing a panel of matched worker–firm data for 1998–2013 wages. The baseline results show that import competition does not decrease unskilled workers’ wages and increases the skill premia of workers with college degrees or those in managerial and professional positions. Large firms and firms with low productivity also increased their wage premia through import competition, but the degree of increase due to firm-level factors is much smaller than that due to factors related to workers’ skill.

Using a dataset of all Japanese manufacturing establishments in 2006 and 2016 and industry- and region-level import shocks, this study examined the impact of the China Shock on the job flows of establishments. Regression analyses found that the industry-level import shock increased the probability of exiting in only a few groups. Interestingly, small establishments in single-unit firms located in non-agglomerated regions adopted a hibernation strategy to cope with the region-level import shock. Furthermore, surviving establishments in this category accelerated both job creation and destruction in response to these two import shocks, thereby amplifying the overall magnitude of job flows. These results became observable owing to the use of establishment-level observations and a detailed classification of job flows.

There exists a hypothesis that proximity and common language/colonial ties are more important for differentiated products than for homogeneous products in forming price information and matching international buyers and sellers.The gravitymodel analysis, however, is not able to show strong evidence to support this hypothesis. In this paper, the author presents the result that machinery, transport equipment and miscellaneous manufactured articles,which are classified into differentiated products, have lost price information effect, which causes the hypothesis lack of empirical support.The degree of price information effect on trade of commodities depends not on their differentiation, but on their industrial origin.