The Japanese Firm as an Innovating Institution
At one level, this paper may be regarded as an exercise in comparative industrial organisation. We are primarily interested in accounting for the highly successful performance of Japanese manufacturing firms in the innovation process. In pursuing this goal, however, it will be necessary to ‘unpack’, and to examine critically, some intellectual baggage that has strongly shaped and influenced the approach to innovative activity in the recent past. To the extent that our approach is convincing, it suggests a reordering of focus and emphasis in the study of innovation.
In this article,we use the Fourier flexible functional form to analyze the efficiency changes of 12 share-holding commercial banks whose branches are expanding quickly.We find that,the fast increase of the numbers and the average scales of bank branches both have significantly positive effects on bank cost efficiencies.During 2000 to 2005,the cost efficiency of the 12 banks as a whole increased in a fluctuant way,and there is a relatively big increase of the efficiency in the latter half of the period compared to the former half.