This paper examines how the intensity of compulsory education affects the time use and academic achievement of children with different socioeconomic backgrounds. The impact is identified off the school-day reduction of Japan in 2002 that resulted when all Saturdays were set as public-school...

In spite of the significant restructuring of the university system in the postwar period, national universities continue to occupy the top end of the prestige hierarchy of universities in Japan. In this paper, we examine long-term trends in the educational credentials of Japanese corporate...

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...

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...

The labor force participation rate of women in Japan has increased in recent decades. To shed light on the mechanism behind this increase, we focus on the explanation that Fernandez, Fogli and Olivetti (QJE (2004)) suggest. They claim that men who are raised by working mothers form a preference...

The way age-specific unemployment rates fluctuate over the business cycle differs significantly across countries. This paper examines the effect of labor-market institutions on the fluctuations of age-specific unemployment rates based on panel data of 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation...

Wage inequality declined in the 1990s for full-time male workers in Japan, while it in- creased in the 2000s. We find that a decreased return to firm-specific human capital, which has been neglected in previous empirical analyses of inequality, is a key factor preventing a rise in wage...

We propose an efficient moment estimator for the probit model with a continuous endogenous regressor. The estimation can be readily implemented using a standard statistical package that can estimate a non-linear system two-stage least squares (instrumental variable) estimator.