A review of the Japanese National Accounts reveals that the Japanese household sector has apparently suffered a capital loss of some 400 trillion-yen in 1990 consumption prices since 1970. This loss is large enough to explain most of the Japanese recession of the 1990's. We can trace some...

This paper presents evidence about the coats of corporate capital in Japan and the US, for a sample of large companies, and evaluates a variety of hypotheses about why the cost might be lower in Japan.We find that the before-tax return to capital in Japan appears slightly lower than in the U.S....

The value of corporate equity in Japan is dramatically smaller than that implied by the sum of the reproduction cost of accumulated investment and the market value of land owned by corporations (that is, the Tobin's average 'q' is much smaller than unity). This discrepancy appears to result from...

A conceptual basis is laid out for measuring the cost of capital for corpora- tions from data typically available in countries such as the US, Canada, and Japan. Attempts are made to carry out the measurement based both on the accounting records of individual companies and on the aggregate...

A dynamic model of the demographic structure of Japan is summarized. It is capable of tracing the dynamic development of the Japanese population, including the distribution of families by age, sex, and marital status of the head, as well as by the number and age of children and other dependents....

Two explanations have been proposed for the observed slowness of wealth decumulation by the elderly in the literature: the precautionary saving induced by (uninsurable) uncertainty about the time of death or by the possibility of major catastrophes in old age that require large outlays; the...

In this paper, we outline the cost minimizing behavior of oligopoly firms and the price adjustment process in the labor market which underlie the traditional formulation of aggregate wage-price behavior in the U.S., and show that resulting equations applied to U.S. data remain stable before and...

Both young and old consumers appear to dissave too little for their behaviour to be consistent with a strict life cycle model. We concentrate on young households and document their behaviour drawing from Italian and Japanese data. We also provide a theoretical set-up which can account for the...

(3) Correcting Japanese accounting statements for unmeasured returns to land has a significantly more important effect: the most conservative correction we attempt raises the implied Japanese return to capital to parity with the United States during the mid-1980's

This paper uses financial statement data for large samples of U.S. and Japanese nonfinancial corporations to estimate the return to capital in each country for the period 1967-83. Interpreting these as measures of the cost of capital, we find that the before-tax cost of corporate capital was...