An economic crisis can be considered as a man-made disaster with the characteristics as an aggregate shock, thus complicating and hindering mutual insurance or help in local communities. This paper investigates the dynamics of productivity in prewar rural Japan and examines which farm households were more vulnerable to the Great Depression, as a representative example of aggregate shocks that have a serious impact on rural sectors. First, using panel data from farm households collected by the Imperial Agricultural Association (Teikoku Nokai), we measured the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) and decomposed it into technical change and efficiency change for the period of 1924-1933. Second, with this panel data, we investigated which farm households were more vulnerable to aggregate shocks. Our main findings are as follows. First, although the MPI declined rapidly after the Great Depression due to the technical and efficiency change, this rapid decline in productivity was temporary. Second, the vulnerability of farm households to aggregate shocks differed by region, and large-scale farmers were relatively robust to them. These differences in vulnerability across farm size may have triggered the structural changes in Japan's prewar agriculture after the Great Depression. Our findings shed light on the dynamics of farm household behavior in prewar Japan from the micro and quantitative perspectives.

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After World War II, Japan's policy makers believed that common forests were underutilized because of their legal status and organization method under customary iriai-type ownership and that modern ownership in the form of group ownership, such as forest producers' cooperatives, or as individual, separate ownership, would improve the situation. Thus, the Common Forests Modernization Act of 1966 was enacted, following successive modernization policies since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. We evaluated the impacts of the past modernization policies on the management of common forests by statistically comparing the performance of modernized and non-modernized 19,690 common forests based on the World Census of Agriculture and Forestry 2000. The performance measures for comparison included planting, weeding, thinning, and harvesting activities. We found less modernized, customary holdings are more active in tending activities such as weeding and thinning, while modernized holdings may have an advantage in harvesting and timber sales.

A direct payment (DP) scheme for hilly and mountfainous areas has been in place in Japan since 2000. This scheme's objective is to fill the gap in production costs between these less favourable areas and other agricultural locations and prevent abandoned farmland from increasing. Eligible rural communities decide whether to receive DPs, and half of the DP allocation in communities with DPs is distributed for collaborative community activities, with the remaining half allocated directly to farmers. We apply a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effect of these payments on farmland use. Using a large farm-level panel data set from before and after the payments were initiated, we employ a causal framework of analysis with a treatment group and two alternative control groups. We find that the payments led to a slowdown in the increase of abandoned farmland among surviving farms. Moreover, the payments have a marginal positive effect on the operated farm size of surviving farmers. The results imply that direct payment schemes in less-favoured areas play a key role in maintaining farmland.