The goal of this paper is to detect the degree to which court decisions control the stringency of employment protection and to investigate how such judicial discretion affects labor market performance. However, identification difficulty arises because court decisions are volatile against...

Despite its significant influence on the actual enforcement of the law, the economic cost of court discretion has been ignored in the literature on employment protection. This paper exploits a distinctive feature of the Japanese judicial system, periodic judge transfers, to identify court...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of better judicial enforcement on the probability of being credit rationed, loan size, and the probability of bankruptcy using household-level data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, conducted by the Institute for Research...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of better judicial enforcement on the probability of being credit rationed, loan size, and the probability of bankruptcy using household-level data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, conducted by the Institute for Research...

We develop a Keynesian cross analysis with a dynamic optimization setting that explains long-run stagnation caused by aggregate demand deficiency. We show that an increase in government purchases boosts GDP through a multiplier process, but the implication is quite different from the...

Does trade affect the equilibrium rate of unemployment? To theoretically examine this question, we incorporate firm-union bargaining considerations into a model with a booming external sector and a stagnating manufacturing sector. In the model, a sustained improvement in the terms of trade...

We propose a microeconomic foundation of the multiplier effect and that of the consumption function using a dynamic optimization model that explains a shortage of aggregate demand and unemployment. We show that government purchases boost aggregate demand through a multiplier-like process but...

In a Diamond-type overlapping-generations setting public debt issuance places no burden on future generations including those who repay the debt if prices and wages are fixed and unemployment occurs in the periods in which public bonds are issued and repaid. Whether the collected fund is spent...

We analyze the impact of population aging on Japan's household saving rate and on its public pension system and the impact of that system on Japan's household saving rate and obtain the following results: first, the age structure of Japan's population can explain the level of, and past and...

We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model with households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different results: with the ratio specification full...