The great dissolution: organization capital and diverging volatility puzzle

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period. The paper aims to reconcile the opposite trends of firm-level and aggregate volatilities. I argue that the rise of organization capital, or firm-specific intangible capital, is the origin of the volatility divergence. Firms in the modern economy have been investing heavily in intangible and organizational assets, such as R&D, management processes, intellectual property, software, and brand name - the "soft" capitals that distinguish a firm from the sum of its physical properties. Most intangible assets are firm-specific, inseparable from the company that originally produced them, and difficult to trade on outside market. Investing in these organization-specific capitals insulates a firm from market-wide shocks, but introduces higher firm-specific risk that does not equally affect its peers. When value creation is increasingly relying on organization capital, the impact of idiosyncratic risk factor rises, while that of general risk factor declines. The former elevates firm-level volatility; the latter reduces aggregate volatility, mainly through weakening the positive co-movements among firms. Therefore, the decrease in aggregate output volatility is not because of less turbulent macro environment, but a result of more heterogeneity among production units. In this sense, the Great Moderation is rather a story of "Great Dissolution". It may indicate greater economic uncertainty faced by individual agents, instead of less. My empirical investigation found that, consistent with the paper's hypotheses, firm-level volatility increases with organizational investment, but general factors' impact on firm performance and a firm's correlation with others decrease with organizational investment. Simulations of the general equilibrium model featuring organization capital investment are capable of replicating the volatility trends at both aggregate and firm level for the past two decades.organization capital, intangible capital, great moderation, firm volatility, business cycle, business investment

Sectoral Structural Change in a Knowledge Economy

The sectoral composition of the US economy has shifted dramatically in the recent decades. At the same time, knowledge and information capital has become increasingly important in modern production processes. This paper argues that a ready explanation for the recent sectoral structural change lies in the difference of intangible capital accumulation across sectors. In the two-sector model of the paper, as the importance of intangible capital increases, labor is shifted from direct goods production to creating sector-specific intangible capital. In the process, the real output and employment shares of the high-intangible sector increase. The model generates sectoral composition change and labor productivity trend that reasonably match the data. It also shows that conventional labor productivity calculation understates the "true" productivity in sectoral goods production. The underestimation is greater for the growing sector. The empirical regressions of the paper indicate a positive and significant association between intangible capital investment intensity and firms' future output and employment growth. The correlation is higher for firms in the growing sector. At the industry level, controlling for industry human capital intensity, physical capital intensity and IT investment level, intangible capital intensity is positively correlated with future industry real output and employment share growth. These findings are consistent with the implications of the model. The paper also presents evidence suggesting that most growing service industries are intangible capital intensive. Thus the theory developed here can also help to reconcile the expansion of the service sector and the seemingly low productivity of the sector.Intangible Capital; Structural Change; Knowledge Economy; Firm Investment;

Factor Endowment, Structural Change, and Economic Growth

This paper aims (1) to test the endowment-based structural change theory proposed by recent studies such as Acemoglu & Guerrieri (2008) and Ju, Lin & Wang (2009); and (2) to explore the linkage between structural coherence and economic growth. By structural coherence, I refer to the degree that a country’s industrial structure optimally reflects its factor endowment fundamentals. Using data from 27 industries across 15 countries, I examine whether higher capital endowment is associated with larger sizes in capital intensive industries for overall fixed capital as well as for three detailed categories of capital – information and communication technology capital (ICT), non-residential structure, and machinery. For the overall capital, I found that the real and nominal output share and employment share of capital intensive industries were significantly bigger with higher initial capital endowment and with faster capital accumulation. This result also applies to ICT capital and partially applies to machinery and structure capital. In addition, the labor income share of capital intensive industries is found to be negatively associated with capital endowment and capital accumulation in most types of capital, which provides one way to understand the relationship between structural change and the decline of labor income share in many sample countries during recent decades. Finally, I test whether a higher level of coherence between capital endowment and industrial structure is related to better economic growth performance. The result shows a significantly positive relationship between a country’s aggregate output growth and the degree of structural coherence in all types of capital. Quantitatively, the structural coherence with respect to the overall capital explains about 35% of the growth differential among sample countries. The results of the paper are mostly robust to alternative measure of capital intensity, to controls for other industry characteristics such as human capital and degree of value-added, and to controls for other determinants of structural change on both demand side and supply side.capital endowment, structural change, economic growth, capital intensity, structural coherence,

DEVELOPMENT OF SIO2 SUPPORTED NICKEL BASED CATALYSTS BY COMPLEXATION WITH ORGANIC MOLECULES FOR CO2 REFORMING OF CH4

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Study on microstructure, corrosion performance and mechanical properties of hypereutectic Zn-Al alloy

Hypereutectic Zn-Al alloys with different cooling rates and their coatings on mild steel were successfully prepared and characterized. Zn - 6 wt. % Al alloy was cast into different moulds to obtain various cooling rates. It was found that the increasing cooling rates reduced the average grain size. High cooling rate also decreased the decomposition rate of primary γ-ZnAl phase. When the cooling rate increased to 10℃/s, a large number of nano-size eutectic grains were formed in the alloy. Through hot-dipping technique, Zn - 6 wt. % Al was coated on tensile bars made of ASTM CRS 1018 steel in order to study the effect of Zn alloy-based coatings on tensile properties of mild steel. By comparing the same types of steel which experienced the same thermal process without coating, it was found that the yield strength and ultimate tensile strength of CRS 1018 were reduced but the elongation was significantly improved. The change of tensile properties might result from the decrease in dislocation densities, which were estimated by nano hardness measurements. Furthermore, the hypereutectic Zn-Al alloys with various Al contents from 6 to 10 wt.% were prepared to study the Al influence on their corrosion behaviors. In the low voltage corrosion, higher Al content was beneficial to the alloys due to passivity whereas Al increased the risk of pitting corrosion in the high voltage test after passive layers were broken down. The microstructure observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of tested samples also supported the obtained corrosion data

ICT関連イノベーションの国際比較 ： 特許データによる考察

本稿では、アメリカUSPTOに登録された各国の特許情報に基づき、日本を始め、アメリカ、ヨーロッパおよびアジア諸国・地域における情報技術に関連するイノベーションの国際比較を行った。 得られた結果は以下のように要約できる。特許の登録件数では、アメリカ、日本、EU15カ国の順に多いが、最近では、アジア各国の成長が著しい。また、フィンランドやアイランドのような情報化先進国とともに、日本や韓国のICT特許の特化係数が最も高いことが分かる。特許一件当たりの引用回数により特許の質をみると、アメリカの被引用件数が最も多く、日本とEU がこれに次ぎ、アジア諸国の引用される回数は少ない。技術スピルオーバーについては、アメリカとアジアは、他国よりイノベーションの成果を吸収しているのに対し、日本とEUは逆に他国にイノベーション成果を流出させているといえる

Implications of the US-China Trade War on EU’s Levels of Trade Restrictiveness

This paper investigates the economic implications of the 2018 US-China trade war on the EU, and measures the trade restrictiveness of non-tariff barriers by applying the Trade Restrictiveness Index methodology under the framework of Kee et al. (2009). A cross-sectional OLS regression was applied to estimate the ad-valorem equivalent of NTBs in 2017 and 2018, which were then used to construct the TRIs and deadweight loss. The paper depicts empirical evidences that NTBs tend to play a more crucial role than tariffs in the EU countries, as their NTBs make, on average, an additional contribution of more than 83% to the overall protection level measured solely by tariffs. Besides, the results suggest that both the restrictive level of NTBs and the overall protection level imposed by the EU fell from 2017 to 2018. In addition, a more-developed EU country tends to impose a lower restrictive level of NTBs than a relatively less-developed EU country during the US-China trade war. Moreover, the decreasing TRI, OTRI, MA-OTRI and DWL during this period reveals that the US and China have both held out the olive branches to the EU, while the EU also seized the opportunity to strengthen bilateral trade and cooperation with them. Especially, the reason for the decreasing DWL can be resulted from the backspin that the positive benefits brought by strengthening relationships and seeking deeper cooperation with alternative trading partners in 2018 outweigh the negative impacts caused by the US-China trade war and broken-down confidence of global investors in 2017. From a sectional level, there is evidence supporting the advice that the EU should try to avoid export products that with the highest AVEs imposed by the US and China to these two countries respectively, such as miscellaneous manufactured articles, rubber and plastics in my case