This paper evaluates the 1999 national income tax reform in Japan by comparing the social marginal costs of public funds (SMCFs) for changing the marginal tax rates in different income brackets before the reform occurred. To do so, we estimate the discrete choice model of labor supply using a...

There are more than 1,700 municipalities serving as insurers in Japan's system of National Health Insurance (NHI). The NHI has several institutional routes to buffer local premiums from abrupt changes in regional health demands that destabilize the NHI benefit expenditures. After briefly...

Forecasting welfare caseloads has grown in importance in Japan because of their recent rapid increase. Given that the forecasting literature on welfare caseloads only focuses on US cases and utilizes limited classes of forecasting models, this study employs multiple alternative methods in order...

We obtain equivalent scales that allow for different number and age of children by estimating a system of demand functions with micro-data for Japanese households. We then compare the estimated scales to the equivalent scales based on the costs of living institutionally set out in the Japanese...

　　 This study proposes decomposition and estimation methods that can be applied to analyze both regional stabilization and redistribution. The method proposed herein follows the approach taken by Shorrocks (1982), and applies it to per-capita level quantities of the relevant...

Despite frequent discussions on regional variations in health care expenditure (HCE), few studies account for the sources of such regional disparities. This study bridges this gap in the literature by taking the following two steps. First, we explore the determinants of regional HCE in Japan,...

The Japanese government provides information on local fiscal performance through the Fiscal Index Tables for Similar Municipalities (FITS-M). The FITS-M categorize municipalities into groups of “similar†entities and provide them with the fiscal indices of their group members. Thus,...

Local governments in Japan implement social assistance programs, called Seikatsu Hogo or Public Assistance (PA). The scope of PA programs is rather large since the PA is the only tax-financed national program that covers those excluded from contributory social insurance programs. Local PA...

This study proposes a method to estimate the social marginal cost of public funds (SMCF) that utilizes household data. First, we recast the existing SMCF formula to highlight the role of individual marginal costs of public funds (IMCF) and their respective distributional weights. Second, we...

While a number of empirical studies have explored the determining factors of welfare caseloads, none of them has examined the effect of workload on caseload. However, several studies outside the field of economics have suggested that workload may be an important factor in determining caseload...