論文

The number of temporary workers in Japan's labor market has increased rapidly since the 1990s. This trend is particularly remarkable in the manufacturing sector, which now relies on sales to foreign markets. This paper formalizes the idea that global competition may encourage manufactures to shift from permanent to temporary workers, proposing a model of multi-product firms motivated to reduce revenue fluctuations. Firms prefer lower sales volatility because of labor adjustment costs. In such a framework, trade liberalization encourages firms to reduce the number of products, which raises the demand for temporary workers because they entail no firing costs. The model is also empirically tested using micro-data from Japanese manufacturing plants. The model's predictions are moderately supported.

Focusing on firms from the electrical machinery and electronics industry, this paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on home productivity using activity-level data rather than, as most previous studies have done, firm-level data. Distinguishing between horizontal and vertical FDI (HFDI and VFDI), it is argued that VFDI changes the activities that firms are engaged in at home after the relocation of production, altering firms’ production function. This means that a direct comparison of productivity at the firm-level before and after the relocation of production is inappropriate. Instead, in order to assess the impact of FDI on home productivity, it is necessary to use activity-level data. Doing so, we obtain results that are consistent with theoretical predictions: HFDI does not necessarily have a significant positive effect on home productivity in activities that parallel those conducted by affiliates abroad. On the other hand, VFDI significantly enhances productivity in activities that have an input-output relationship with the activity relocated abroad.