This paper overviews the entire landscape of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has not emerged out of cryptocurrency competition, but rather became a dominant currency as the first broad market based cryptocurrency. But there are more than a hundred of cryptocurrencies in the market, and...

This paper analyses the human growth (height and weight) pattern of babies born in January and July 2001, using the longitudinal survey of babies in 21st century conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. The human growth is regressed on initial conditions (i.e. height and weight...

This paper explores a reasonable consumption tax (VAT) reform in Japan, after passing the tax reform bill in the Diet in August 2012. First, the macro (SNA) data indicates that tax revenue increases by about 12 trillion yen if the VAT rate is raised from 5% to 10%. Secondly, the VAT revenue...

This paper investigates whether the participation costs play an important role in explaining the households' limited stock market participation in Japan. In order to identify such costs, we focus on the difference of stock holding probability between two household groups whose financial literacy...

The primary objective of this paper is to examine how and to what extent changes in income tax rates and income tax deductions affect income inequality from longitudinal perspectives, by using microdata from Japanese individuals and households. The findings of this paper could shed light on the...

This paper discusses the potential and limitations of Bitcoin as a digital currency. Bitcoin as a digital asset has been extensively discussed from the viewpoints of engineering and security design. But there are few economic analyses of Bitcoin as a currency. Bitcoin was designed as a payments...