Households will purchase more items than usual prior to a value added tax (VAT) rate increase in order to avoid taxation. Since this type of arbitrage requires resources such as shopping time and storage space, the impacts of tax increases vary across households, which has brought distributional...

This paper has constructed a theoretical model to explain why the share of those who remain unmarried has increased in Japan. It is still common for women to leave the labor market due to marriage and thereby see an irreversible decrease in their income. Taking into consideration of the...

This paper investigates the effectiveness and problems of the temporary housing program, which is being applied to the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake. While prefab homes are usually distributed as temporary housing, rent subsidies have become an additional option. Subsidies would be...

Based on Japanese prefectural cross-sectional data, marriage rates and female labor force participation rates are positively correlated, while the trade-off between them has been observed with time series data. The key fact for understanding this positive correlation is that job exit rates due...

Discrepancy between saving rates in the System of National Accounts (SNA) and the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) has been resolved using newly available statistics. While the known factors such as differences in coverage and definition of savings explain around 70% of the...

This paper constructs a price index for elderly households in which differences in expenditure share and points of purchase are explicitly taken into account. Elderly households spend more on food and medical care, while younger households spend more on education, transportation, and...

In a case-study, we show that developing new goods is constrained by demand uncertainty. It was believed that knowing "needs" would be critical for R&D investment decisions, and thus developing new goods. However, although the need for flat panel televisions was known for many years, they were...

In this paper we consider the implications for Japan's aging society and low birth-rate with respect to the enhancement of efficiency in the retail sector. While it is, in general, difficult to measure the productivity of the retail sector, we made it possible, using a deregulation as a natural...

This paper extends the analysis of Unayama (2010; 2011), which identifies the evolution of the compatibility of jobs and marriage/child birth using repeated cross-sectional data from the population census from 1980 to 2005, adding the latest data from the 2010 Population Census. Using the same...

This publication is in Japanese. Neither an English translation of the publication nor an English abstract is available.