Junichi Yamasaki

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University

I am an associate professor at Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University.

Full CV and contact are available in PDF here.

Research interests: Development Economics, Economic History, Political Economy, and Urban Economics.

Featured Project

From Samurai to Skyscrapers: How Transaction Costs Shape Tokyo (with Kentaro Nakajima and Kensuke Teshima) (Latest ver.)

Abstract:

We study how transaction costs of changing lot size shaped Tokyo’s urban development, using a 100 m*100 m cell-level dataset spanning the 19th–21st centuries. Exploiting the 1868 release of elite samurai estates, we show these areas still have larger lots, taller buildings, higher firm productivity, and land prices 153% above nearby areas, relative to surrounding neighborhoods, even after extensive redevelopment. Our framework interprets this price gap as a lower bound on transaction costs. Before 1945, these areas were cheaper, implying the rising value of large lots with skyscraper construction—an evolution that may accompany future vertical growth in developing cities too.