APL (Ajiken Power Lunch)

APL (Ajiken Power Lunch) is a lunchtime workshop open to public, including IDE staffs, visiting research fellows, IDEAS students, outside researchers and graduate students. This workshop provides a platform for presentation of any work in progress where we can discuss in either English or Japanese.

Those who would attend a seminar are asked to announce yourself to receptionists on your arrival at the IDE and to obtain APL Organizers' signature on your admission card after the seminar.

February 16, 2016. (Tuesday) 16：00-17：30

Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization C24 Meeting Room 　

An Empirical Assessment of Defensive Innovation to Chinese Import Competition in Japan

This paper empirically examines the defensive innovation hypothesis that firms which have been more exposed to low wage country import competition intensively undertake more innovative activity, using the high quality Japanese firm-level panel dataset over the period 1994-2005.

The novel feature of the analysis is to relate firm-level variations of the patent usage to import competition. The preliminary results suggest that intensified import competition from China has resulted in more innovative activity of Japanese firms, consistent with the finding of European firms in Bloom et al. (2015). Moreover, such competition has also led to both an increase in patents that are used as well as non-used. This finding remains robust to instrumenting Chinese import competitions, the inclusion of other firm-level controls, and measures of import competition from other high and middle income countries.

Nobu Yamashita (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology & Keio University)

Tadashi ITO

English