Research

This paper introduces an individual-level historical database from five editions of the Japanese Personnel Inquiry Records (PIR), published between 1903 and 1939. The PIR is a selective biographical directory of individuals in leading public- and private-sector positions. We harmonize biographical and family information across editions and document changes in listed individuals’ characteristics and family size, as well as the extent to which their biological sons and adopted childrenappear in the same or later PIR editions. Illustrative applications examine geographical mobility, marriage, and family formation. These applications show how the database supports historical research while highlighting limitations arising from changing coverage and incomplete family records.

Why do elite families often maintain their social and economic status across generations? This paper examines the role of adoption in sustaining elite persistence in prewar Japan. Under the Japanese inheritance system, families without a biological son could adopt an heir to continue the family lineage and transfer assets and social status. Using novel father–heir linked data constructed from the Personnel Inquiry Records (1903–39), we compare elite outcomes between biological and adopted heirs. We find that adopted heirs were substantially more likely to remain elite and to reach the extreme upper tail of the income distribution than biological heirs. The results are robust to family, regional, occupational, and educational controls. Overall, the findings suggest that adoption functioned as an institutional mechanism that expanded the pool of potential successors beyond biological lineage, thereby strengthening intergenerational elite persistence in prewar Japan. 

When societies transition from hereditary to meritocratic systems, to what extent does educational expansion broaden access to elite positions and change inherited patterns of occupational sorting? We study Japan after the Meiji Restoration, which abolished samurai hereditary privileges in public-sector positions and modernized education. Exploiting cohort-specific discontinuities in access to secondary schooling created by the expansion of public secondary schools, we find that greater access increased elite attainment among both samurai and commoner families, but most additional elites entered sectors historically associated with their family background. Many had non-elite fathers, indicating greater upward intergenerational mobility into elite status.

Abstract: Clark and Ishi (2012) and Clark (2014) show that elite persistence within one generation (30 years) has a similar rate across different countries and family backgrounds. However, they do not explore potential differences in elite persistence between close family members and extended relatives. To address this gap, we construct a unique dataset of father-son pairs among the top 0.1% of socially distinguished individuals, such as CEOs and high-ranking civil servants. Our findings indicate that elite persistence is similar across social classes and occupations (0.40–0.51), even when focusing only on direct father-son relationships.

In the aftermath of World War II, a large-scale management program, sponsored by the United States and known as the Productivity Program, was implemented in several European countries and Japan. The program involved sending corporate executives to observe business practices at U.S. firms and aimed to share modern management practices and enhance productivity in the recipient countries. In this paper, we first summarize the similarities and differences in how the program was implemented in Japan and European countries based on historical documents. Next, using data on Japanese firms that participated in the program, combined with a database of stock-listed firms, we document the characteristics of participating firms and compare them to other stock-listed firms during the same period. We also provide a simple comparison of firm performance over the first two decades of the program between participating firms and non-participating firms with similar initial characteristics. 

We examine how unilateral environmental regulation in a major importing country affects foreign exporters. China’s Operation National Sword policy, which imposed staggered bans on waste imports, created a sharp and plausibly exogenous loss of market access for specific products. Using confidential Japanese customs data and a staggered event study design based on firms’ pre-policy exposure, we document four responses: an immediate collapse in banned exports to China; diversion to third country destinations; environmentally selective reallocation toward destinations with weaker waste management performance; and within-firm substitution toward non-banned products. These adjustments are incomplete, generating persistent declines in aggregate exports and sizable global spillovers.