The 178th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, July 17, 2026 13:30 to 15:00
Place Only in-person at Conference Room, 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus.
http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Presenter Chiaki Yamamoto, Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University.
Title: “Legal Infrastructure and Urban Development: Evidence from Attorney Density in England, c. 1790-1851” (joint with Masaki Hattori)
Abstract:
This paper examines whether local legal infrastructure contributed to urban development in England during the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on attorneys as providers of legal services, contract enforcement, debt recovery, conveyancing, and commercial intermediation, it asks whether towns with higher concentrations of attorneys in the 1790s followed distinctive trajectories of demographic and occupational change by 1851. We construct a new town-level dataset from the Universal British Directory, published in 1791–98, currently covering 455 towns and to be extended to the full set of 480 towns. We link this dataset to population data for 1801 and 1851 and to occupational information from the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM). Preliminary results suggest that, after controlling for initial town size, higher attorney density in 1801 is associated with more complex occupational structures in 1851. This finding contributes to a broader view of urbanisation in which town growth was not driven only by industrialisation and the rise of manufacturing centres. Towns also grew by performing traditional urban functions, including reducing transaction costs in commerce, credit, property transfer, and local administration. Although the present analysis remains preliminary and does not yet claim definitive causality, it offers new evidence on the relationship between local legal services, institutional infrastructure, and uneven urban development in industrialising England.
The 177th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, June 19, 2026 13:30 to 15:00
Place Zoom meeting.
Presenter Kentaro Nakajima, Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University.
Title: “Economies of Density in Public Service Provision: Evidence from the Time Allocation of Waste Collection Trucks”
Abstract: How does urban density generate cost savings in spatially organized public services? This paper studies this question using one-second GPS records from municipal waste collection trucks in Japan. The data reveal the sequence of station visits and allow me to decompose truck operating time into service time at waste stations and non-service time associated primarily with spatial traversal between stations. I document three facts. First, active collection accounts for only about one-third of truck operating time. Second, station-level service exhibits economies of scale: service time increases with the population served by a station, but much less than proportionally. Third, higher population density is associated with substantially lower per-capita non-service time, making the traversal margin quantitatively central. As an interpretable benchmark, a one-percent increase in population density is associated with a cost reduction equivalent to an 11.13-percent reduction in waste generation per resident. Counterfactual exercises show that the fiscal consequences of population decline depend on both where residents are lost and how the station network adjusts. A uniform five-percent population decline raises aggregate per-capita operating cost by 0.83 percent when station density is fixed, but this increase is almost fully offset when station counts adjust with population. Population loss concentrated in high-density districts raises per-capita operating cost, whereas population loss concentrated in low-density districts reduces aggregate operating cost among the remaining population. These results highlight spatial concentration and service-network adjustment as important determinants of the fiscal sustainability of local public services in shrinking cities.
The 176th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, May 15, 2026 13:30 to 15:00
Place Zoom meeting.
Presenter Akifumi Ishihara, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo.
Title: “Managing Strategic Communication for Monetary Transfers”
Abstract: We investigate a model of an informed expert and an uninformed decision maker, in which the expert sends cheap-talk messages and can voluntarily make monetary transfers. By strategically ignoring some advice, the decision maker can induce the expert to make transfers as costly signalling. Consequently, fully revealing communication is not optimal for the decision maker, even when the parties have a common interest. In the canonical uniform-quadratic environment with an upwardly biased expert, we explicitly characterize an optimal equilibrium: pooling among low types and separation among high types. Comparative statics suggest that a more biased expert can make the decision maker better off by strengthening the expert's incentive to signal through transfers.
The 175th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, April 17, 2026 13:30 to 15:00
Place Only in-person at Conference Room, 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus.
http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Presenter Tomohiro Machikita, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
Title: “Do Deepening Suppliers Diversify? The Motorcycle Industries in Indonesia and Vietnam” (joint with Mai Fujita and Yuri Sato).
Abstract: For developing countries seeking to gain from linking with value chains led by multinational corporations (MNCs), building suppliers of intermediate inputs is crucial. Notably, entry into such chains requires investments for responding to MNCs' requirements. Despite the abundance of literature on upgrading of suppliers, little is known about the effects of such investments on suppliers' sustained growth. This paper examines whether suppliers can achieve sustained growth- as defined by firm-level profitability and the acquisition of new customers- by applying process upgrading cultivated in value chains led by MNCs. We use original survey data based on interviews of motorcycle component suppliers in Indonesia and Vietnam, which enables us to propose a new measure of process upgrading. We find that transferability of capability for process upgrading can help provide outside options in terms of acquiring new customers. While our empirical findings and evidences from qualitative case studies partially support the conventional theory that argues relation-specific investment locks suppliers into the current transactions, this study presents a new view that redeployment of suppliers' process upgrading for customers outside the existing industry, which reduces dependence on the dominant customers, is a practicable path of their sustained growth.