Measuring the Effect of Infant Industry Protection: The Japanese Automobile Industry in 1955-1965

This paper examines the Japanese automobile industry to measure the effect of import restriction policy for infant industry. Import restriction policy can provide large amount of domestic demand for producers and help them to acquire the experience of production. It has been said to be a key driving force of the dramatic growth of the Japanese automobile industry. Compared with a subsidy policy, however, an import restriction causes some types of distortions. Conducting the counterfactual exercise, I explore what it would have happened if instead the optimal subsidy had been provided to Japanese automakers. This exercise measures the welfare effect of an actual restriction policy in terms of an optimal one. That is, it quantifies how close the welfare level of the actual policy was to the level of the optimal subsidy policy. From the experimental exercise, I find the fact that the import restriction reached to only 55 percent of the optimal welfare level.

Horizontal Mergers and Divestment Dynamics in a Sunset Industry

In an oligopolistic market, socially excessive entry takes place because of business-stealing effect which is a gain to the entrant but not to the industry as a whole. Similarly, in a sunset industry with declining demand, now socially excessive capacity cannnot be dissolved because everyone intends to free ride on the reduction of industry supply expected from someone else’s divestment. As a result, no firm will divest, even though divestment contributes to the saving on fixed costs. This paper highlights the role of mergers as a device for internalizing the business-stealing effect and thereby promoting divestment, and examines if the merger-induced divestment could improve the total welfare using the case of cement mergers in Japan. A model of divestment based on the Markov perfect equilibrium framework of Ericson and Pakes (1995) is estimated by an asymptotic least squares. Then a counterfactual experiment is conducted to quantify the welfare impact of mergers, and to show that merged firms in fact divested their facilities more and contributed to the improvement of the total welfare despite the reduced consumers surplus.dynamic discrete game; facility divestment dynamics; horizontal mergers; sunset industry; cement

Horizontal Mergers and Divestment Dynamics in a Sunset Industry

In an oligopolistic market, socially excessive entry takes place because of business-stealing effect which is a gain to the entrant but not to the industry as a whole. Similarly, in a sunset industry with declining demand, now socially excessive capacity cannnot be dissolved because everyone intends to free ride on the reduction of industry supply expected from someone else’s divestment. As a result, no firm will divest, even though divestment contributes to the saving on fixed costs. This paper highlights the role of mergers as a device for internalizing the business-stealing effect and thereby promoting divestment, and examines if the merger-induced divestment could improve the total welfare using the case of cement mergers in Japan. A model of divestment based on the Markov perfect equilibrium framework of Ericson and Pakes (1995) is estimated by an asymptotic least squares. Then a counterfactual experiment is conducted to quantify the welfare impact of mergers, and to show that merged firms in fact divested their facilities more and contributed to the improvement of the total welfare despite the reduced consumers surplus

Horizontal Mergers and Divestment Dynamics in a Sunset Industry

In an oligopolistic market, socially excessive entry takes place because of business-stealing effect which is a gain to the entrant but not to the industry as a whole. Similarly, in a sunset industry with declining demand, now socially excessive capacity cannnot be dissolved because everyone intends to free ride on the reduction of industry supply expected from someone else’s divestment. As a result, no firm will divest, even though divestment contributes to the saving on fixed costs. This paper highlights the role of mergers as a device for internalizing the business-stealing effect and thereby promoting divestment, and examines if the merger-induced divestment could improve the total welfare using the case of cement mergers in Japan. A model of divestment based on the Markov perfect equilibrium framework of Ericson and Pakes (1995) is estimated by an asymptotic least squares. Then a counterfactual experiment is conducted to quantify the welfare impact of mergers, and to show that merged firms in fact divested their facilities more and contributed to the improvement of the total welfare despite the reduced consumers surplus

Prolonged maturation of prefrontal white matter in chimpanzees

Delayed maturation in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with complex cognitive processing, has been proposed to be specific to humans. However, we found, using a longitudinal design, that prefrontal white matter volume in chimpanzees increased gradually with age, and the increase appears to continue beyond the onset of puberty, as in humans. This provides the first evidence for a prolonged period of prefrontal connection elaboration in great apes

Aipl1 is required for cone photoreceptor function and survival through the stability of Pde6c and Gc3 in zebrafish

Genetic mutations in aryl hydrocarbon receptor interacting protein-like 1 (AIPL1) cause photoreceptordegeneration associated with Leber congenital amaurosis 4 (LCA4) in human patients. Here we reportretinal phenotypes of a zebrafish aipl1 mutant, gold rush (gosh). In zebrafish, there are two aipl1 genes,aipl1a and aipl1b, which are expressed mainly in rods and cones, respectively. The gosh mutant geneencodes cone-specific aipl1, aipl1b. Cone photoreceptors undergo progressive degeneration in the goshmutant, indicating that aipl1b is required for cone survival. Furthermore, the cone-specific subunit ofcGMP phosphodiesterase 6 (Pde6c) is markedly decreased in the gosh mutant, and the gosh mutationgenetically interacts with zebrafish pde6c mutation eclipse (els). These data suggest that Aipl1 isrequired for Pde6c stability and function. In addition to Pde6c, we found that zebrafish cone-specificguanylate cyclase, zGc3, is also decreased in the gosh and els mutants. Furthermore, zGc3 knockdownembryos showed a marked reduction in Pde6c. These observations illustrate the interdependence ofcGMP metabolism regulators between Aipl1, Pde6c, and Gc3 in photoreceptors