Field of Research

International Economics, Organizational Economics, Public Economics

Research Topics

 Fragility and Resilience of Supply Chains, and Firm-level Productivity

Overview of Research

Recently, there have been a number of major supply chain disruptions such as Brexit, Trump’s trade wars, COVID-19 Pandemic, the Ukraine invasion, and extreme weather events associated with climate change. When faced with such events, firms try to adapt in many ways including restructuring their supply chains. Some firms are better at finding alternative suppliers, and they are therefore able to maintain supplies of critical inputs and successfully continue operations even in turbulent times. Other firms, however, fail to find alternative suppliers, which can result in the closure of factories for a certain period of time, as recently documented for the automobile industry when it suffered a severe shortage of semiconductors. Thus, the ability to find alternative suppliers is fundamental to firms’ resilience against supply chain disruptions.

Using panel data from 2007 to 2018 on buyer-supplier linkages in Japan, our paper studies the effects of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake on firm performance and supplier relationships. In a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, our paper focuses on buyer firms outside the disaster area and compares those with and without suppliers in the disaster area. On average, treated firms managed to “weather the storm” – their ability to replace lost suppliers swiftly allowed them not to be differentially hurt by the earthquake. Nonetheless, buyers in long-term relationships with suppliers in the disaster area suffered significant sales losses and struggled to replace their old suppliers. These results imply that it is important for firms to quickly switch to new suppliers when they face a big supplier shock. Also, the governments should support firms’ search for alternative suppliers after shocks to achieve the resilience of supply chains.

Also, in other research projects, I have been working on private firms’ proprietary data and government administrative data to study firm behavior and supply chain reorganization in response to shocks.

KAWAKUBO, Takafumi 
Lecturer
Degree: Ph.D., Economics, LSE, UK
tkawakubo.osipp@osaka-u.ac.jp

OSIPP Faculty

	AKAI, Nobuo Professor	Public Economics
	HASUO, Ikuyo  Professor	Global Governance, International Public Administration
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