Under present financial accounting standards, in Japan and in U.S., firms can hoose pension discount rates, which they use for earnings measurement, at their discretion. First, this paper investigates, what factors affect their choice of pension discount rates. The sample firms in this paper...

We investigate whether the credit crunch in Japan affected household welfare and the manner in which it did. We augment the theoretical framework of a consumption Euler equation with endogenous credit constraints and estimate it with household panel data for 1993-1999, generating several...

In this study, we analyze suicide rates among OECD countries, with particular effort made to gain insight into how suicide in Japan is different from suicides in other OECD countries. Several findings emerged from fixed-effect panel regressions with country-specific time-trends. First, the...

This paper investigates Zhou [4]'s money search model, where money is divisible, agents can hold any amount of money, and production of goods is costly, and presents a sufficient condition, expressed in terms of exogenously given parameters, for the existence of single-price equilibria.

In this paper, we investigate the nexus between life insurance and suicide behavior using OECD cross-country data from 1980 to 2002. Through semiparametric instrumental variable regressions with fixed effects, we find that for the majority of observations, there exists a positive relationship...

Random matching models with di erent states are an important class of dynamic games; for example, money search models, job search models, and some games in biology are special cases. In this paper, we investigate the basic structure of the models: the existence of equilibria, the global...

We formulate and implement a new empirical procedure to examine the validity of PPP in the long-run for 153 countries by using the familiar cross-country data set of Heston, Summers, and Aten (2002). Unlike the existing studies that rely on mean reversion of real exchange rates, we explicitly...

This paper develops a new technique for proving the existence of monetary equilibria in money search models. In money search models with divisible money, the set of equilibria, if it exists, is at least one-dimensional. We develop a method to prove the existence of such a set in a fairly simple...

A conventional wisdom in economics is that a model dealing frictionless markets with a large number of agents always yields a Walrasian outcome. In this paper we assess the above argument in a dynamic framework by modeling centralized auction markets, and show that in such markets the outcomes...

Recently, many people criticize the traditionally accepted principles of realization, matching, and allocation. In addition, the reporting performance project in the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) is willing to substitute the extant concept of net income for the unexperienced...