This paper proposes a new hedging scheme of European derivatives under uncertain volatility environments, in which a weighted variance swap called the polynomial variance swap is added to the Black-Scholes delta hedging for managing exposure to volatility risk. In general, under these...

Japan experienced high growth of TFP following World War II. This paper studies the sources of this technological growth and documents the role played by different government policies in achieving such growth. We find that in nonagricultural sectors, TFP growth occurred at first through the...

This paper estimates the aggregate output elasticity of social capital that characterizes the aggregate returns to social capital. With this aim, we apply Nonneman and Vanhoudt's (1996) augmented version of the augmented Solow model of Mankiw et al. (1992) by including social capital as an...

The financial crisis in 1997 caused serious deterioration of the Korean economy. We examined the credit crunch in Korea and how it affected household welfare. With household panel data from 1996-1998, we estimated a switching regression model of a consumption Euler equation, which is augmented...

Using a unique household-level dataset on the situation after the Kobe earthquake in 1995, we test the full consumption risk sharing hypothesis, relaxing the separability assumption, and examine households' simultaneous choice of risk coping measures. Using multivariate probit estimations, we...

In this study, we analyze suicide rates among OECD countries with a 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-trend. First, the...

This paper aims to identify the obstacles to school progression by integrating field surveys conducted in twenty-five Pakistani villages, using economic theory and econometric analysis. The full-information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation of the sequential schooling decision model reveals...

In December 2005 and January 2006, we conducted a pilot survey to collect detailed information on eighty rickshaw pullers and twenty-six rickshaw owner-contractors in north-east Delhi. This is a preliminary report based on the data thus collected.

In this article, we review economic theories and empirical studies on the socioeconomic aspects of suicide. Through our survey, we would like to emphasize the importance of studying suicide by employing a "rational" approach that complements the medical perspective on suicide, which assumes...

This article investigates the abrupt jump in the number of suicide cases in Japan in 1998 and the subsequent persistency of this figure by utilizing a generalized decomposition formula. In particular, by considering the change in the demographic structure, we decompose the 1998 jump in the...