Tsutomu Watanabe – författare

This book is one of the first comprehensive works to fill the knowledge gap resulting from the limited number of empirical studies on interfirm networks. The in-depth empirical research presented here is based on a massive transaction relationship database of approximately 400,000 Japanese firms. This volume, unlike others, focuses on the role of interfirm networks in three different fields: (1) macroeconomic activities, (2) economic geography and firm dynamics, and (3) firm–bank relationships. The database for this work is constructed in collaboration with Japan''s largest credit research company, Teikoku Data Bank, and covers a substantial portion of Japanese firms with information on firms'' transaction partners, shareholders, financial institutions, and other attributes, including their locations and performance.

Networks prevail in many aspects of economic activities and play a major role in explaining a wide variety of economic phenomena from business cycles to knowledge spillovers, which has motivated economists to produce a number of excellent works.  In the policy arena, there has been a growing concern on the vulnerabilities of networks based on the casual observation that idiosyncratic shocks on firms can be amplified through inter-firm connections and leads to a systemic crisis. Typical examples are the manufacturing supply-chain networks in the automobile and electronics industries which propagated regionally concentrated shocks (the Great East Japan Earthquake and floods in Thailand in 2011) into global ones. An abundance of theoretical literature on the formation and functions of networks is available already.

This book breaks new ground, however, and provides an excellent opportunity for the reader to gain a more integrated understanding of the role of networks in the economy. The Economics of Interfirm Networks will be of special interest to economists and practitioners seeking empirical and quantitative knowledgeon interfirm and firm–bank networks.

This book answers the question of how exactly property price indexes should be constructed.

The formation and collapse of property bubbles has had a profound impact on the economic administration of many nations. The property price bubble that began around the mid-1980s in Japan has been called the 20th century''s biggest bubble. In its aftermath, the country faced a period of long-term economic stagnation dubbed the "lost decade." Sweden and the United States have also faced collapses of property bubbles in the 20th and early 21st centuries, respectively.

This book provides practical examples of how the theory of property price indexes can be applied to the issues of property as a non-homogenous good and a technological and environmental change.