This study investigates the welfare implications of social security reforms in Japan. Based on the overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic income risk, we consider four social security reform plans: (1) gradual reduction in the replacement rate by half, (2) sudden cut in the replacement...

This paper provides a new explanation for China's extremely low consumption-to-GDP ratio, highlighting the constraints of the "household registration system" (Hukou) on China's household consumption. Our baseline results show that the consumption of migrants without an urban Hukou is 30.7% lower...

This study investigates the redistributive effect of the social security reform in urban China using the nationally representative urban household surveys in 1995 and 2002. The main findings are as follows. First, public pension is the main income for the elderly in urban China. Majority of...

Household consumption and saving behavior have been the central theme of recent macroeconomic literature. Following the work of Robert Hall (1978) and a series of papers by Fumio Hayashi, the focus of the literature has been on dynamic consumption behavior. Using the Family Income and...

Household consumption and saving behavior have been the central theme of recent macroeconomic literature. Following the work of Robert Hall (1978) and a series of papers by Fumio Hayashi, the focus of the literature has been on dynamic consumption behavior. Using the Family Income and...

Recently, Japanese public pension scheme has been discussed more often, especially about how to finance the scheme. It is possible to finance the scheme by wage-proportional contribution or by Value-Added-Tax, but the allocation may be different depending on the financial method. I find that an...

This paper studies the extent to which the impact on consumer spending differs between temporary and permanent, as well as anticipated and unanticipated tax changes. To discriminate between them, we use institutional information such as legal distinction between temporary and permanent tax...

In this paper, using an OLG model with heterogeneous households, we investigate economic inequality in the recent decades in Japan. We decompose the causes of economic inequality into macroeconomic factors and a demographic factor, and demonstrate that the earning inequality in the model...

The value of human capital wealth and its return process are important to quantify in order to study consumption behavior and portfolio allocation. This paper introduces a new approach to measure the value of an economy's total human capital wealth. By assuming that the consumption to wealth...

This paper investigates whether the participation costs play an important role in explaining the households' limited stock market participation in Japan. In order to identify such costs, we focus on the difference of stock holding probability between two household groups whose financial literacy...