The intranational business cycle in Japan

Abstract

This paper studies the intranational business cycle--that is the set of regional (prefectural) business cycles--in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series of relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify cycles in annual data from 1955 to 1995 and bilateral cross-correlations of prefectural GDPs are calculated for all pairs of prefectures, in our results we find fairly high cross-correlations. The paper then turns to an econometric explanation of the cross-correlation coefficients in the augmented gravity model framework. Two prefectures with similar GDPs and a shorter distance between them lead to business cycle synchronization whilst those with larger regional gaps in factor endowments (capital, labour, and human capital) result in more idiosyncratic business cycle. Copyright 2011 Oxford University Press 2010 All rights reserved, Oxford University Press.