A number of hypotheses have been proposed to examine why Japan's household saving rate was high. This paper takes advantage of a micro-level data from Public Opinion Survey on Household Financial Assets and Liabilities to reexamine the effects of the bonus system on households' savings. We find...

Japan's employee-based corporate governance is in a far-reaching transition, and has a larger presence of outside directors as board members in the 1990s. We examine how board composition affects measures for employment downsizing by constructing a unique firm-level measurement of excess...

The Japanese economy has experienced price deflation since the mid-1990s. Despite the importance of overcoming deflation, there has been little recent research on price expectations in Japan. This paper takes advantage of an original and rich quarterly household-level data set from the "Kokumin...

This is a revision of our previous paper (Shimizutani and Noguchi (2002) ESRI Discussion Paper Series No.60) based on a new dataset extended to 2003. This study takes advantage of micro-level information to make a projection of demand for at-home care services in Japan. We have observed a rapid...

Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, henceforth (PTCA) for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI)-a high-tech treatment-is more frequently used in Japan than in other developed countries. This paper adopts the two-phase model to examine whether the high PTCA use is driven by...

This paper investigates determinants and impacts of R&D activities in overseas subsidiaries, using .rm-level panel data for Japanese multinational enterprises. We distinguish between overseas innovative and adaptive R&D according to survey responses and .nd substantial di.erences between the two...

This is the first study to take advantage of Japan's public long-term care insurance as a unique and natural experiment to evaluate how outsourcing long-term care spurs female labor supply. We utilize our unusual and rich panel data from households with an elderly person who needs care and who...

An increase in female labor force participation is indispensable to maintain sustainable economic growth in Japan, whose population is experiencing rapid aging and a decline in fertility. One remedy to these problems that is often proposed to be effective in stimulating the female labor supply...

Japan's total fertility rate declined to 1.32 in 2002, the lowest in its modern era. Such a drastic decline in fertility rate is an exception in the world. What the decrease in birthrate brings is an unbalanced demographic composition between a productive and dependent population. This...

We investigate how people coped with unexpected losses caused by the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake by using some unusually rich household data. Several empirical findings emerged. We found that the coping means were specific to the nature of the loss caused by the earthquake. For example,...