This paper aims to explain why housing investment in Japan stagnated in the 2000s. Housing investment consists of two parts: replacement and a net increase of housing stock, which can be further decomposed into changes in the number of households and the housing utilization rate. Using the...

One of the biggest political issues in Japan is an increase in the rate of value added tax (VAT). In this paper, we evaluate its impact on household expenditure, using Japan's April 1997 VAT rate increase from three to five percent as a case study. A rate increase induces price hikes, and...

This paper investigates consumption responses to the child allowance benefits. Life-cycle permanent income hypothesis predicts that the responses are likely to be limited, as the increase in life-time income resulting from the benefits is small relative to other income resources. The data...

This paper extends the analysis of Unayama (2010; 2011), which identifies the evolution of the compatibility of jobs and marriage/child birth using repeated cross-sectional data from the population census from 1980 to 2005, adding the latest data from the 2010 Population Census. Using the same...

This publication is in Japanese. Neither an English translation of the publication nor an English abstract is available.

Based on Japanese prefectural cross-sectional data, marriage rates and female labor force participation rates are positively correlated, while the trade-off between them has been observed with time series data. The key fact for understanding this positive correlation is that job exit rates due...

Discrepancy between saving rates in the System of National Accounts (SNA) and the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) has been resolved using newly available statistics. While the known factors such as differences in coverage and definition of savings explain around 70% of the...

This paper constructs a price index for elderly households in which differences in expenditure share and points of purchase are explicitly taken into account. Elderly households spend more on food and medical care, while younger households spend more on education, transportation, and...

In a case-study, we show that developing new goods is constrained by demand uncertainty. It was believed that knowing "needs" would be critical for R&D investment decisions, and thus developing new goods. However, although the need for flat panel televisions was known for many years, they were...

In this paper we consider the implications for Japan's aging society and low birth-rate with respect to the enhancement of efficiency in the retail sector. While it is, in general, difficult to measure the productivity of the retail sector, we made it possible, using a deregulation as a natural...