荒 知宏准教授からのお知らせです。下記のとおり、近代経済セミナーとの共催で、「Fukushima Economics Workshop 2018」を実施いたします。事前の参加申込みは不要ですので、興味のあるセッションに自由にお越しください。なお、すべての報告は英語で行われます。
本ワークショップはJSPS科研費 16K17106 および経済経営学類の奨学寄付金の助成を受けています。
大会プログラム：
1）2018年9月21日（金） 経済棟 ７階720合同研究室
【時間】14：00～14：50
【論文タイトル】Firm-Specificity of Asset, Managerial Capability, and Labor Market Competition
報告者：Cheng-Tao Tang氏（国際大学）
【概要】
We develop a model that captures the link between specificity of a firm's asset and capability of the firm's top management, two important sources of profitability. It contributes to strands of economics and management literature by proposing a logic through which firm-specificity and heterogeneity are determined endogenously through labor market competition. Higher importance of managerial capability raises labor mobility, which reduces firm-specificity of asset and human capital, and firm size, whereas higher importance of asset specificity yields opposite effects. We discuss how our model results can enrich a prediction of transaction cost economics on the relationship between uncertainty and governance structure. Also, we discuss implications of our model in the contexts of cross-stage comparisons within an industry’s life-cycle and cross-country differences.
【時間】15：00～15：50
【論文タイトル】Decomposing the Effect of SNAP
報告者：牧岡 亮氏（Penn State/RIETI）
【概要】
I analyze the impact of an increase in SNAP benefits (the supplemental nutrition assistance program, formerly called food stamps) on shopping behavior, consumption choice, and prices. Using consumer scanner data, I show that the increase in benefits due to ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) (1) reduces shopping effort (the number of shopping trips as well as use of specials and coupons), (2) raises the price for the same barcode, and (3) results in substitution into high price products. With these empirical findings in mind, I construct a structural model with costly shopping which allows me to construct a theory-based CES price index that incorporates preference shocks and allows me to estimate the extent of these different margins of adjustment. The increase in SNAP benefits is associated with a 4.6% increase in the price index. Of this, 15% comes from the pure price increase, 10% comes from a change in consumption variety both within and across product groups, 74.2% comes from a change in preference shocks, and 0.3% comes from a change in the number of shopping trips. As a counter-factual exercise, I analyze the impact of an upcoming pilot policy, which allows SNAP recipients to use SNAP benefits to buy from online retailers. By saving time for shopping trips, the pilot policy raises SNAP recipients’ welfare by at least $15 a quarter purely through easier access to retail stores. The gains can be as high as $250-$327 a quarter if they allocate the saved shopping time into labor supply.
【時間】16：00～16：50
【論文タイトル】Fun in Education
報告者：Jenny Wong氏（国際大学）
【概要】
This paper presents the first estimates of the causal effect of a videogame task on students’ academic choices and performance and offers a simple model to flesh out potential mechanisms and policy implications. Our empirical results are consistent with a model where low-performing students benefit more from consumption-intensive education, owing to an increase in the productivity of leisure hours and a decrease in the likelihood of procrastination. The impacts are large, with students who had access to this simple videogame task scoring 9.05% higher in their final exam. They also take more courses on related subjects, being more likely to graduate with degrees in the same field.
【時間】17：00～17：50
【論文タイトル】Novelty-seeking Traits and Innovation
報告者：古川 雄一氏（中京大学）
【概要】
People' desire for novelty is often perceived to encourage innovation. However, our cross-country evidence suggests that the relationship can be negative. To explain this empirical finding, we develop a new R&D-based growth model which incorporates people's novelty-seeking traits. In our model, people's novelty-seeking traits are captured by their extra preference towards new goods; besides, innovation is achieved through new and existing product development as two separate processes of innovation, both requiring costly and time-consuming investment activities. We find that if the level of inherent novelty seeking is higher than some threshold level, then the economy is caught in an underdevelopment trap with less innovation; otherwise, it provides innovation perpetually and achieves long-run growth. Our model shows that the effects of higher levels of inherent novelty seeking on innovation and economic growth can be negative, consistent with our empirical finding.
2） 2018年 9月22（土） 経済棟 ７階720合同研究室
【時間】9：10～10：00
【論文タイトル】Patent Laws and Innovation in the Global Firm
報告者：坂本 陽子氏（Wisconsin-Madison）
【概要】
This paper provides evidence that offshore patent laws influence global firms' innovation decisions. Within a simple model of multinational production, we find that a novel consequence of imitation risk is that firms innovate selectively, directing investments in product development toward relatively short-lived varieties that are difficult to imitate prior to obsolescence. A key implication of firms' selective product development is that patent reforms tend to increase not only innovation by firms, but also the average economic lifetime of the products they develop -- both to extents varying non-monotonically across industries according to rates of underlying technological obsolescence. Using detailed data on U.S. patent grants and citations during 1976-2006 and U.S. multinational firms' affiliate innovation investment during 1982-2009, we find empirical regularities consistent with these hypotheses.
【時間】10：10～11：00
【論文タイトル】Complementarity between Firm Exporting and Firm Importing on Industry Productivity and Welfare
報告者：荒 知宏氏（福島大学）
【概要】
How do trade barriers affect aggregate trade flows in intermediate inputs in the presence of firm heterogeneity? How large are the welfare gains from trade for intermediate inputs relative to those for final-good trade? To address these questions, we develop a heterogeneous-firm model in which firm exporting and firm importing play a key role in industry productivity and welfare. We derive the gravity equation in intermediate-input trade in order to show that reductions in intermediate-input trade costs increase aggregate trade flows more than those in final-good trade costs, particularly through the extensive margin. We also find that, due to an extra adjustment operating through the extensive margin in intermediate-input trade, the welfare gains from trade are greater in intermediate-input trade than those in final goods.
【時間】11：10～12：00
【論文タイトル】Can RTA Labor Provisions Prevent the Deterioration of Domestic Labor Standards?: the Cases of Statutory Minimum Wages and Employment Protection Regulations
報告者：鎌田 伊佐生氏（新潟県立大学）
【概要】
This study investigates whether labor clauses in regional trade agreements (RTAs) are effective to maintain or improve the domestic labor standards in the signatory countries. The effects of RTA labor clauses on two measures of labor standards, statutory minimum wages and the strictness of employment protection, are empirically analyzed using a unique dataset that classifies the population of effective RTAs into those with and without labor clauses, together with multi-year data on minimum wages and the indicator of employment-protection strictness for a wide variety of countries. The result shows that having labor-clause-free RTAs with more or larger trading partners are associated with lower statutory minimum wages although this negative association is not found for labor-clause-inclusive RTAs. The separate estimation for countries in different income groups further demonstrates that this result is chiefly driven by middle-income countries that sign RTAs with high-income partners, implying that signing RTAs with more or larger high-income trading partners would create to the government of a middle-income country, which has a comparative advantage over the high-income partners in labor-intensive sectors, a downward policy pressure on statutory minimum wages whereas labor clauses could alleviate such a negative policy effect of RTAs on minimum wages. This finding is also contrasted with the case of actual wages for which no evidence is found for the impact of RTAs with or without labor clauses to reaffirm that labor-clause-free RTAs could create downward policy pressure on statutory minimum wages but RTAs might not bring market pressure on actual wages regardless of whether or not the RTAs include labor clauses. Finally, unlike this case of statutory minimum wages, the empirical analysis finds no clear evidence for the potential impacts of RTAs either with or without labor clauses on the strictness of employment protection in the signatory countries.
【開催代表者】
荒 知宏 （准教授）
【問合わせ先】
荒 知宏研究室
