We examine the period from 1991 to 2005 to document the effects of a changing Japanese labor market on trends in the cost of job change. During this period, job change penalties and the extent to which they were age-related grew. Evidence is also found of a diminishing specificity in human...

We estimate the causal effects of childcare availability on the maternal employment rate using prefecture panel data constructed from the Japanese quinquennial census 1990-2010. We depart from previous contributions by controlling for prefecture fixed effects, without which the estimates can be...

This paper provides novel evidence on the long-term effect of the Great Recession on the quality of jobs, in particular whether the Great Recession results in the replacement of “good jobs” (characterized by high wage/benefit, job security, and opportunity for training and development) with...

The median wage in Japan has fallen nominally since 1999 due to a severe recession, while the statutory minimum wage has steadily increased over the same period. We used large micro-data sets from two government surveys to investigate how the minimum wage has affected wage distribution under the...

Behind rising natural rate of unemployment, they often point out the decline in matching efficiency of the labor market. We empirically examine the cause of matching friction based on the theory of directed search model such as Burdett, Shi and Wright (2001). From rich micro data on vacancy size...

Diverging economic inequality has become a common focus of economic debate in developed countries. In particular, the recent experience of Japan has started attracting international attention. We take advantage of a rich micro-level data set from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (1989-2003) to...

Wage increases, along with job tenure, are one of the most robust empirical regularities found in labor economics. Several theories explain these empirical regularities, and such theories offer sharp empirical predictions for the relation between productivity-tenure and wage-tenure profiles. The...