Author Archives: benbansal

PhD thesis

By benbansal Posted in Academia, Tokyo Leave a reply

I have been amiss not to post a link to my PhD dissertation, which has been published on the website of my former university, the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, about a year ago. The title is “Urban Space in Economic History: Tokyo as Asia’s First Megacity 1945-1970”. Find the summary after the break.

There are quite a few sections in there which I would like to branch out, extend and polish for publication. Some fragments will likely only live in this document. Let the power of search engines and indexation make them discoverable if they’re helpful to anyone.  Continue reading →

Regulatory forbearance in South Asia

By benbansal Posted in Economics Leave a reply

A little snippet of the daytime work I do, which is banking and financial sector analysis for the Asian Development Bank. I wrote a little research piece on regulatory forbearance in South Asia, i.e. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan, four countries I have been working on over the past months. You can read the entire piece here, and this is the abstract:

RF is a key concessionary strategy employed by regulators around the world to help both borrowers and banks cope with the economic crisis resulting from COVID-19. While an expedient short-term measure, there are known long-term risks associated with it. These risks are higher the deeper and longer the measures are, and the more vulnerable the underlying economy is. Using a “RF Index”, we find that among the four chosen case studies in South Asia, the likely negative effects of RF are the highest in Sri Lanka, followed by Nepal.

Urban Space as a Factor of Production

By benbansal Posted in Academia, Japan, Tokyo Leave a reply
The first of hopefully 3-4 articles drawn from my PhD finally got published with Social Science Journal Japan, a journal run by the University of Tokyo and distributed by OUP. It’s taken a little (!) longer than expected due to my day job as well as general COVID-induced turmoil in all our lives. Anyway, I will put up a proper post celebrating this moment. For now, you can read the abstract below and find the full article here.

Urban Space as a Factor of Production: Accounting for the Success of Small Factories in Postwar Tokyo

This paper demonstrates that small manufacturing firms in postwar Tokyo were exceptionally successful. Not only were they more productive than their national peers, they were also remarkably competitive vis-à-vis large factories in Tokyo. The existing explanations for this double outperformance do not take full account of the urban setting in which this process took place. Small factories compensated for higher labor costs by being more efficient users of urban space. They thrived thanks to Tokyo’s particular urban form, which included a preference for mixed use and often blurred the boundaries between living and workplace. Small factories also benefited from being embedded in the relatively egalitarian structure of postwar Tokyo, as the city avoided spatial stratification despite megacity growth. Although Tokyo’s small factories remain important, their competitive edge has eroded from the 1970s onward.

Manuscript ideas

By benbansal Posted in Academia, Japan, Tokyo Leave a reply

Economic history has a long shelf-life when it comes to the data, but needs to be read in a changing context. Besides taking stock of my research, I want to interrogate myself what impact COVID-19 may have on a future monologue.

Continue reading →

The future of retail

By benbansal Posted in Academia, Tokyo Leave a reply

The famous Tokyo Tower view

I was remiss not to post a link to a Morgan Stanleys Ideas podcast that I featured on. Head to the website to listen to the episode “Shopping for the Future”, in which the authors try to understand what modern retail can learn from Japan. I start to speak at around 7:00.

Syllabus Metropolitan Tokyo

By benbansal Posted in Academia Leave a reply

The last of four posts sharing my TUJ syllabi is Metropolitan Tokyo. I probably put most work into this class: It was the one closest to my own research, the bar was high and I kept adapting the syllabus the more I taught it, in total five times over two years. Continue reading →

Syllabus Global Cities

By benbansal Posted in Academia Leave a reply

The last of my four classes I taught at TUJ was this general education — “Gen Ed” — urban studies class, which TUJ ran for three consecutive semesters. Looking back, this may have been the most enjoyable of the classes of the four I taught in Tokyo. (I have also added the syllabi for two other classes I taught, i.e. Politics of the Global Economy and Economics of Development and Growth and will shortly put up the one for Metropolitan Tokyo.) Continue reading →

Syllabus Politics of the Global Economy

By benbansal Posted in Academia Leave a reply

Another syllabus of one of the classes I taught at TUJ after the jump, this time for a course called Politics of the Global Economy. This was a more or less straightforward undergraduate IPE class following a standard textbook. Do get in touch if you need any of the lecture materials or want to hear more about the course.  Continue reading →