The maintenance and repair cost of durable goods has traditionally been hidden from consumers and yet has been non--negligible part of Life Cycle Cost (LCC) computation. Predicting the maintenance and repair cost is difficult because many of these durable goods do not have constant failure rates. For some durable products such as automobiles, it is often the case that we have at least a rough idea as to their reliability. In this study we propose and illustrate a method to convert automobile reliability data in the U.S. to their monetary maintenance and repair cost. In our method, we first estimate a statistical model from the widely available reliability data. Then we predict the reliability from the model. Finally we convert the predicted reliability to cost figures. The proposed statistical model takes care of the possible bias introduced by partially missing reliability data. Conversion to cost figure is done on the twenty-six 1996-model-year vehicles popular in the U.S. during 1992--1999.

The importance of intangible assets regarded as the corporate assets has been increasing in recent years. We estimate a corporate brand equity that is one of the corporate intangible assets for the firms in the Japanese manufacturing industry. There are some models for estimating a corporate brand equity. The model of Simon and Sullivan (1993) is superior to other models in terms of economic adequacy, objectivity, and comparability because their model is based on the market value of the firm's securities and can estimate the corporate brand value by the use of statistical methods. We employ their model for estimating the brand equity of the firms listed on the 1st and 2nd Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange during the 12 years from 1990 to 2001. The result of the empirical study reveals that advertisement is very effective for raising the corporate brand equity. In addition, it turns out that advertisement as well as research and development expenditure are effective for raising market share and stock price.

Undervaluation and long run under-performance out of the three puzzles related to the IPO are both resulted from the fact that the initial price is relatively higher than the offer price and consequent prices after the IPO. This paper aims to analyze which price is the closest to the theoretical price calculated with residual income model. In addition, multiple sets of cost of capital and growth rate were assumed to overcome the difficulty when estimating the theoretical value. Preliminary results using firms which went public in both 1999 and 2000 showed divergence between the initial price and the theoretical value, while there were no significant difference between the offer price and the theoretical value. This result was more significant when we focused on year 1999, which is said to be an IPO bubble period. However, if only the data of year 2000 is used, the divergence was diminished to where statistical significance was very weak.

In view of the difficulties that accompanied the introduction of management theories formed by Japanese companies in the United States, I conducted a hypothetical examination from questionnaires and interviews into what the context of management control of Japanese companies is, and how this is about to be changed. From this we can see that as a result of the changes in the personnel management system that has contributed to the construction of long-term psychological contracts, the context is changing, and the management controls of Japanese companies are beginning to develop a new structure

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between performance appraisal and determinants of managerial compensation in Japanese firms. In this study the main stress falls on the group dynamism observed in the course of the introduction of performance-based incentive system to the firm. We analyzed the economic effect of compensation plan on firm performances or shareholders' returns. From the standpoint of performance-based incentive contracts, it is very important to consider stock option and corporate governance. It should be clear that the wage reform is mandatory in order to enhance firm performances. This result means that performance-based incentive system must not only be understood as wage system but also as an enhancing activity of morale or personnel development.

This paper attempts to explore the roles and characteristics of subjective performance evaluation in Japanese firms. Many Japanese firms are currently trying to balanced scorecard, activity-based costing, EVA and performance based reward system in an effort to improve the objectivity of performance measurement and evaluation process. Because subjective performance evaluation has played a critical role in policy management and personnel appraisal in Japanese firms for long time, implementation of these new performance measurement and evaluation systems, which ignore the roles of subjectivity in the process, might fail. This paper tries to identify how subjective performance evaluation has contributed to performance of Japanese firms.