ADBI hosted the annual National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Japan Project conference, featuring cutting edge economic research on Japan. This year’s papers very much focused on microeconomics, with a number of studies using a “natural experiment” approach to analyze diverse phenomena, including firms’ decisions to use American-style or Japanese-style import procurement, women’s childbirth and employment decisions, and changes in risk assessment and the location of firms after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011.