Papers by Sebastien LECHEVALIER

Discussion Paper Series A No.707, 2020
There are significant differences across countries in terms of redistribution by the government. ... more There are significant differences across countries in terms of redistribution by the government. This corresponds to underlying dissimilarities in preference for redistribution. Particularly, previous literature compared the US and Europe and proposed several explanations of these differences, from aggregation of individual determinants (e.g. one’s income) to more holistic ones such as shared values at the national level (i.e. social beliefs).
This paper, therefore, aims to analyse the impact of socio-demographic factors and social beliefs on preference for redistribution. First, we focused on two different dimensions of preference —the government’s role in reducing the difference in income and the approach of the tax system with high income. Secondly, we extended the comparison by including a developed Asian country, Japan.
Based on the results, the following two attitudes are not fully compatible: many people support the governmental intervention, but not for more tax on the rich, especially in Japan. Furthermore, the difference in the attitude on the governmental intervention mainly comes from the variance in the role of social beliefs. On the other hand, the average income and wealth do not explain the difference in preference.
Countries are characterized by different social beliefs, which affects the differences in sub-preferences. However, not only the distribution of social beliefs, but also their statistical relation to the sub-preferences explains the country level disparity. In addition, the US and Europe comparison under/over-estimates these statistical associations in the world, since an Asian country, such as Japan, may have a different structure.

Structural change and economic dynamics, 2017
The purpose of this article is to analyze the revival of industrial policies from the late 2000s
... more The purpose of this article is to analyze the revival of industrial policies from the late 2000s
in Japan and Korea and their limitations. Our approach has two major characteristics. First, we adopt
the perspective of historical institutionalism to focus on the relation between IPs and financial systems
and study their evolution over the last 40 years. Second, by mobilizing the concepts of institutional
complementarities and hierarchy, we discuss the limits of this revival in a context of liberalized financial
systems, to which government entities in charge of industrial policies have contributed. Our major
result is that, in the context of financialization, past complementarities of the developmental state
have weakened and contradictions have arisen. It resulted in a restructuration of state capabilities to
design and implement industrial policies, and to its inability to subordinate finance to its goals, despite
the discourses and ambitions of governments. However, and this is our second result, comparison
between Japan and Korea also allows us to identify some significant differences in the initial
institutional arrangements and in the process of institutional change, which are analyzed as sources of
greater state capabilities in Korea than in Japan in the current period.
Abenomics initially generated high expectations but it has more recently come to be seen as yet a... more Abenomics initially generated high expectations but it has more recently come to be seen as yet another failed economic experiment. In addition, discussion of Abenomics often verges on caricature. It is thus crucial to provide a critical and balanced evaluation. We argue that, over the past five years, the proactive policies pursued under Abenomics played a decisive role in reversing one cause of the Japanese slowdown – inconsistent economic policies – and that they are now yielding preliminary results. We are more critical with regard to long-term issues: as the case of trade policy shows, the problem is not so much a lack of structural reform as limits to its ability to increase Japan's growth potential.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the revival of industrial policies from the late 2000s ... more The purpose of this article is to analyze the revival of industrial policies from the late 2000s in Japan
and Korea and their limitations. Our approach has two major characteristics. First, we adopt the
perspective of historical institutionalism to focus on the relation between IPs and financial systems and
study their evolution over the last 40 years. Second, by mobilizing the concepts of institutional
complementarities and hierarchy, we discuss the limits of this revival in a context of liberalized
financial systems, to which IPs have contributed. Our major result is that, in the context of
financialization, past complementarities of the developmental state have weakened and contradictions
have arisen. It resulted in a restructuration of state capabilities to design and implement IPs, and to its
inability to subordinate finance to its goals, despite the discourses and ambitions of governments.
However, and this is our second result, comparison between Japan and Korea also allows us to identify
some significant differences that may explain diverging trends in terms of the deindustrialization and
internationalization of these two economies
Critique Internationale, 2014

The purpose of this paper is to propose a synthesis and an original interpretation of recent empi... more The purpose of this paper is to propose a synthesis and an original interpretation of recent empirical works dealing with inequalities in Japan. Most of them have been able to use panel micro data – and sometimes linked employers-employees data – and it has allowed them disentangling individual and firm effects and linking the evolutions of productivity dispersion and of wage differentials. The major result is that rising inequalities in Japan from the 1990s correspond to a large extent to an unprecedented growth in the disparity of wages and employment security between wage earners of comparable status, working in firms of similar size and belonging to the same sector. The second result is that it is possible to link these structural changes on the labor market to industrial dynamics, namely deindustrialization and increasing corporate heterogeneity. We interpret this evolution as a 'resegmentation' of the Japanese labor market.

Research Policy, 2014
JEL classification: L6 O14 O30 B25 Keywords: New industries Entrepreneurship Intrapreneurship Rob... more JEL classification: L6 O14 O30 B25 Keywords: New industries Entrepreneurship Intrapreneurship Robot technology Japanese innovation system a b s t r a c t How do new industries emerge? This paper aims to answer this question by analyzing the key actors in this process. We focus on the new industry of service robot. By using data of Japanese patent applications, we analyze the role of new firms and of collaborations. We find that the emergence of the industry is mainly triggered by established large firms, rather than by new firms. We further show that collaborations are at the core of new industry formation, but that they possess distinct properties. As the emergence of this new industry matches to the characteristics of Japan's institutional and knowledge regime we essentially argue that the notion of regimes with fewer start-ups being inefficient is erroneous. Our main conclusion is that industry emergence in intrapreneurial regimes seems to be distinctive from entrepreneurial regimes.

Beyond the general issue of institutional change at the aggregate level, some studies have shown ... more Beyond the general issue of institutional change at the aggregate level, some studies have shown that the diversity of Japanese firms has increased since the late 1990s, both in terms of performance and organization. This paper contributes to this literature by investigating the evolving employment practices at the firm level. In mobilizing a database of listed manufacturing firms, we focus on the evolution of the speed of downsizing between the 1990s and the 2000s. A specificity of our paper is that we do not limit our analysis to the introduction of individual effects but we rather resort to a Bayesian estimation procedure, which yields to (firm-specific) individual forecasts of the parameters of the adjustment process modelled with random coefficients. The first major result we get is a decreasing average speed of downsizing, contrary to what is found in a simple estimation with individual effects. Second, we confirm the increasing heterogeneity of Japanese firms between the 1990s and the 2000s, through a rising dispersion of the speed of downsizing. Third, we are able, from a descriptive viewpoint to identify some characteristics of firms with different speed of downsizing.
Authors:
Sebastien, Lechevalier
Cyrille, Dossougoin
Christophe, Hurlin
Satoko, Takaoka
Faire des Sciences Sociales (Volume 3 : Généraliser), 2012

Socio Economic Review, 2013
While Western industrialized societies have almost gained a canonical status within political eco... more While Western industrialized societies have almost gained a canonical status within political economy approaches (Blyth, 2003), Asian economies and their internal diversities have received less attention. This special issue of SocioEconomic Review 1 aims to integrate Asia into the comparative capitalism approach in a more differentiated way, and hereby hopes to substantiate it. Asian countries are becoming the leading economies worldwide and confront Western scholars with many puzzles-such as the lack of institutional coherence in China, which has so far not hindered its growth, or the contrasting speed of institutional change in Japan and Korea despite a comparable institutions and comparable exogenous shocks to which they have been exposed. Our knowledge of how Asian economies are governed by institutional rules and political decisions , how institutional setups and outcomes are interlinked, and how their frameworks are based on historical foundations is weakly developed. A relatively rich literature exists for Japan and to some extent on Korea (Orrù et al.)

Although heterogeneity in the performance of firms is a well-established stylized fact, we still ... more Although heterogeneity in the performance of firms is a well-established stylized fact, we still lack full understanding of its origins and the reasons why it persists. Instead of assuming that performance differences are exogenous, this paper focuses on two endogenous strategies - innovation and global engagement - and interprets them as two ways to accumulate knowledge and improve firms' capabilities. We are particularly interested in analyzing interactions between these strategies and their effect on firms' performance. By using a firm-level panel dataset drawn from a Japanese large-scale administrative survey for the years 1994 - 2003, we first find that innovation and exporting strategies are characterized by complementarities, which define coherent productive models or patterns of learning. Second, we show that these different strategies lead to various performances in terms of productivity and survival. Third, by using a propensity score matching approach, we show that these differences in performance are lasting. Overall, our paper shows that the interaction of innovation and export investments is a source of permanent differences in performance among firms.
This paper aims at explaining two stylized facts of the Lost Decade in Japan: rising wage inequal... more This paper aims at explaining two stylized facts of the Lost Decade in Japan: rising wage inequalities
and increasing firm-level productivity differentials. We build a model where firms can choose between
efficiency wages with endogenous effort and competitive wages, and show that it can replicate those facts. Using
Japanese microeconomic data, we find support for the existence of efficiency wages in one group of firms and
competitive wages in the other group. Based on those results, a simulation shows that the share of firms using
efficiency wages has declined, within sectors, during the Lost Decade, as predicted by the model.
Yannick KALANTZIS, Ryo KAMBAYASHI, and Sébastien LECHEVALIER

There is a growing body of literature analyzing empirically the evolution of
productivity dispers... more There is a growing body of literature analyzing empirically the evolution of
productivity dispersion at the firm level and its determinants. This paper contributes to this
literature by investigating the case of Japanese firms during the so-called “Lost Decade” (1992-
2005), which is still under-analyzed. We use a firm-level panel dataset taken from a large-scale
administrative survey, the Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities (BSBSA)
for the years 1994-2003.
Our results can be summarized as follows. First, we confirm that there was an overall
increase in both labor productivity and total factor productivity dispersion, especially in the
manufacturing sector from 1998 onward. Second, in the case of Japanese firms during the Lost
Decade, and contrary to what has been found for some other countries, we find no significant
impact of the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) on productivity
dispersion. On the other hand, we do find evidence of a significant and positive impact of
internationalization on productivity dispersion. In addition, the evolution of the competitive
environment appears to play a role: we find that the increase in the Hershman-Herfindahl index
observed in some sectors, which characterizes a more oligopolistic environment, is associated
with an increase in productivity dispersion.

This paper examines the effect of participation in government-sponsored R&D consortia on the
R&D ... more This paper examines the effect of participation in government-sponsored R&D consortia on the
R&D productivity of firms in the case of robot technology in Japan. We attempt to provide a new empirical
analysis and discussions on the issue of government project evaluation by using indicators of the quality of
patents, by investigating the impact of the evolution of government programs, and comparing governmentsponsored
R&D consortia with collaborative R&D among firms.
Using indicators of the quality of patents which enables us to provide an estimation of quality-adjusted
research productivity, we find that participation in government programs has a positive impact on the research
productivity of participating firms, but the impact of participation became much higher after the design of
government programs in this field changed in the late 1990s. Also, we find that participation in governmentsponsored
consortia has a greater impact on research productivity than participation in collaborative R&D among
firms. This may support government involvement in R&D as a coordinator of R&D collaboration.

The growing trend of collaborative R&D has been well documented recently, both at a global level
... more The growing trend of collaborative R&D has been well documented recently, both at a global level
and through national and industry case studies. However, there is not yet any consensus regarding the following
decisive questions: what are the exact level and evolution of R&D collaboration? What are the benefits of
collaboration? What are the motives and determinants of firms engaging in R&D collaboration? In our opinion,
these questions have not yet been answered due to the limitations of the data used in most empirical studies
(large questionnaire surveys or very specific case studies).
The main novelty of this paper is the use of patent data with a focus on information concerning
inventors. These data are less biased than questionnaire surveys in terms of the size of the institutions; they are
objective and are particularly appropriate for analyzing the benefits of collaboration. As the identification of the
institutions to which individual inventors are affiliated is a particularly time consuming task, we focus on robot
technology in Japan since the beginning of the 1990s.
Our results are as follows. First, although the level of R&D collaboration in RT in Japan increased
between 1991 and 2004, especially in the case of collaboration between firms and universities, it still remains
low and is dominated by inter-firm collaborations. Second, we cannot definitively reject the conclusion that only
the scale of the research has an impact on the quality of patents, when the unit of analysis is the patent; however,
we show that there are significant spillover effects of collaboration, which imply an indirect effect on quality.
Third, the determinants and motives which encourage firms to decide to engage in collaborative research differ
depending on the partner they are collaborating with. In the case of collaboration with other firms, IO theories
hold, as the existence of spillovers acts as an incentive. Regarding the collaboration with universities and public
research institutes, the validity of capability theory, which emphasizes the quest for complementary knowledge
and capability, is confirmed by our empirical investigation.

This paper aims to provide an alternative framework to previous studies of deflation in Japan. We... more This paper aims to provide an alternative framework to previous studies of deflation in Japan. We focus on the real dimension of the price dynamics and propose an imperfect competition model, which describes a rent economy, where the formation of prices can be separated into the markup (level of the rent in the goods market) and the unit labor cost (distribution of the rent in the labor market). We use a panel industry dataset to analyze the impact of institutional and structural factors on the heterogeneous price dynamics of 10 manufacturing sectors. Although the evolution of unit labor costs seems to be the driving
force of price dynamics in the manufacturing industry, our structural analysis leads to consider the importance of the increasingly competitive environment, as captured by rising import penetration. Along with the decline of bargaining power of the workforce, this is at
the origin of the deflationary pressures that characterized the Japanese economy during the Lost Decade.
Authors: Sébastien Lechevalier, Nicolas Canry, Julien Fouquau
The growing trend of collaborative R&D has been well documented recently, both at a global level ... more The growing trend of collaborative R&D has been well documented recently, both at a global level and through national and industry case studies. However, there is no general agreement on its causes as well as on the motives of the firms collaborating in R&D with other players. The Japanese innovation system (JIS) is no exception. Furthermore, in this case, it is particularly important, because the JIS has been described since the 1970s as dominated by "in-house" R&D by large firms and this feature has been considered as one reason of the limits that the JIS reached at the end of the 1980s.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the evolution of the Japanese employment system has been charac... more Since the beginning of the 1990s, the evolution of the Japanese employment system has been characterized by a micro –macro paradox. While case studies show the intensity of restructuring and downsizing, most of the studies at a macro level conclude to the absence of change. This article contributes to this debate, using a micro database, focusing on the electrical machinery sector in a panel framework and considering a long enough period to make a comparison between the 1990s and the 1970s. The …rst major result is a stable average speed of employment adjustment but an increasing heterogeneity of this speed at the level of the …rms. The second main result is the change of the underlying model of employment adjustment , with an increasing impact of the …nancial characteristics of the …rms, which may also be the main explanation of the increasing heterogeneity of the employment adjustment across …rms.
Le Mouvement social, 2005
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Papers by Sebastien LECHEVALIER
This paper, therefore, aims to analyse the impact of socio-demographic factors and social beliefs on preference for redistribution. First, we focused on two different dimensions of preference —the government’s role in reducing the difference in income and the approach of the tax system with high income. Secondly, we extended the comparison by including a developed Asian country, Japan.
Based on the results, the following two attitudes are not fully compatible: many people support the governmental intervention, but not for more tax on the rich, especially in Japan. Furthermore, the difference in the attitude on the governmental intervention mainly comes from the variance in the role of social beliefs. On the other hand, the average income and wealth do not explain the difference in preference.
Countries are characterized by different social beliefs, which affects the differences in sub-preferences. However, not only the distribution of social beliefs, but also their statistical relation to the sub-preferences explains the country level disparity. In addition, the US and Europe comparison under/over-estimates these statistical associations in the world, since an Asian country, such as Japan, may have a different structure.
in Japan and Korea and their limitations. Our approach has two major characteristics. First, we adopt
the perspective of historical institutionalism to focus on the relation between IPs and financial systems
and study their evolution over the last 40 years. Second, by mobilizing the concepts of institutional
complementarities and hierarchy, we discuss the limits of this revival in a context of liberalized financial
systems, to which government entities in charge of industrial policies have contributed. Our major
result is that, in the context of financialization, past complementarities of the developmental state
have weakened and contradictions have arisen. It resulted in a restructuration of state capabilities to
design and implement industrial policies, and to its inability to subordinate finance to its goals, despite
the discourses and ambitions of governments. However, and this is our second result, comparison
between Japan and Korea also allows us to identify some significant differences in the initial
institutional arrangements and in the process of institutional change, which are analyzed as sources of
greater state capabilities in Korea than in Japan in the current period.
and Korea and their limitations. Our approach has two major characteristics. First, we adopt the
perspective of historical institutionalism to focus on the relation between IPs and financial systems and
study their evolution over the last 40 years. Second, by mobilizing the concepts of institutional
complementarities and hierarchy, we discuss the limits of this revival in a context of liberalized
financial systems, to which IPs have contributed. Our major result is that, in the context of
financialization, past complementarities of the developmental state have weakened and contradictions
have arisen. It resulted in a restructuration of state capabilities to design and implement IPs, and to its
inability to subordinate finance to its goals, despite the discourses and ambitions of governments.
However, and this is our second result, comparison between Japan and Korea also allows us to identify
some significant differences that may explain diverging trends in terms of the deindustrialization and
internationalization of these two economies
Authors:
Sebastien, Lechevalier
Cyrille, Dossougoin
Christophe, Hurlin
Satoko, Takaoka
and increasing firm-level productivity differentials. We build a model where firms can choose between
efficiency wages with endogenous effort and competitive wages, and show that it can replicate those facts. Using
Japanese microeconomic data, we find support for the existence of efficiency wages in one group of firms and
competitive wages in the other group. Based on those results, a simulation shows that the share of firms using
efficiency wages has declined, within sectors, during the Lost Decade, as predicted by the model.
Yannick KALANTZIS, Ryo KAMBAYASHI, and Sébastien LECHEVALIER
productivity dispersion at the firm level and its determinants. This paper contributes to this
literature by investigating the case of Japanese firms during the so-called “Lost Decade” (1992-
2005), which is still under-analyzed. We use a firm-level panel dataset taken from a large-scale
administrative survey, the Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities (BSBSA)
for the years 1994-2003.
Our results can be summarized as follows. First, we confirm that there was an overall
increase in both labor productivity and total factor productivity dispersion, especially in the
manufacturing sector from 1998 onward. Second, in the case of Japanese firms during the Lost
Decade, and contrary to what has been found for some other countries, we find no significant
impact of the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) on productivity
dispersion. On the other hand, we do find evidence of a significant and positive impact of
internationalization on productivity dispersion. In addition, the evolution of the competitive
environment appears to play a role: we find that the increase in the Hershman-Herfindahl index
observed in some sectors, which characterizes a more oligopolistic environment, is associated
with an increase in productivity dispersion.
R&D productivity of firms in the case of robot technology in Japan. We attempt to provide a new empirical
analysis and discussions on the issue of government project evaluation by using indicators of the quality of
patents, by investigating the impact of the evolution of government programs, and comparing governmentsponsored
R&D consortia with collaborative R&D among firms.
Using indicators of the quality of patents which enables us to provide an estimation of quality-adjusted
research productivity, we find that participation in government programs has a positive impact on the research
productivity of participating firms, but the impact of participation became much higher after the design of
government programs in this field changed in the late 1990s. Also, we find that participation in governmentsponsored
consortia has a greater impact on research productivity than participation in collaborative R&D among
firms. This may support government involvement in R&D as a coordinator of R&D collaboration.
and through national and industry case studies. However, there is not yet any consensus regarding the following
decisive questions: what are the exact level and evolution of R&D collaboration? What are the benefits of
collaboration? What are the motives and determinants of firms engaging in R&D collaboration? In our opinion,
these questions have not yet been answered due to the limitations of the data used in most empirical studies
(large questionnaire surveys or very specific case studies).
The main novelty of this paper is the use of patent data with a focus on information concerning
inventors. These data are less biased than questionnaire surveys in terms of the size of the institutions; they are
objective and are particularly appropriate for analyzing the benefits of collaboration. As the identification of the
institutions to which individual inventors are affiliated is a particularly time consuming task, we focus on robot
technology in Japan since the beginning of the 1990s.
Our results are as follows. First, although the level of R&D collaboration in RT in Japan increased
between 1991 and 2004, especially in the case of collaboration between firms and universities, it still remains
low and is dominated by inter-firm collaborations. Second, we cannot definitively reject the conclusion that only
the scale of the research has an impact on the quality of patents, when the unit of analysis is the patent; however,
we show that there are significant spillover effects of collaboration, which imply an indirect effect on quality.
Third, the determinants and motives which encourage firms to decide to engage in collaborative research differ
depending on the partner they are collaborating with. In the case of collaboration with other firms, IO theories
hold, as the existence of spillovers acts as an incentive. Regarding the collaboration with universities and public
research institutes, the validity of capability theory, which emphasizes the quest for complementary knowledge
and capability, is confirmed by our empirical investigation.
force of price dynamics in the manufacturing industry, our structural analysis leads to consider the importance of the increasingly competitive environment, as captured by rising import penetration. Along with the decline of bargaining power of the workforce, this is at
the origin of the deflationary pressures that characterized the Japanese economy during the Lost Decade.
Authors: Sébastien Lechevalier, Nicolas Canry, Julien Fouquau