In recent decades, the world has faced an increasing number of natural and man-made disasters. Such disasters include tsunamis, earthquakes, the current ongoing financial crisis, terrorism, riots, and wars. These disasters generate tremendous social and economic costs, especially for the poor in...

This paper uses a unique household data set collected in Vietnam to empirically test the necessary conditions for an extended version of the consumption risk-sharing hypothesis. The test explicitly incorporates self-production and uses natural disasters such as avian influenza, droughts, and...

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

In this paper, we investigate the gap between the first target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the actual allocation of grant aid in the late-1990s and the early-2000s in order to identify necessary policy adjustments to achieve the goal. As a theoretical framework, we extend the...

This paper examines if and how past experience affects people's perception towards disasters. In particular, we study if past experience enables people to form a probabilistic belief as opposed to ambiguity or unawareness, i.e., Knightian uncertainty. To answer the question, we use a unique...

This paper reviews the impacts of natural disasters on firm location choice and real estate prices. More specifically, we first study if awareness of possible natural disasters affects location choice. Then, we investigate the impacts of natural disasters on land prices. We collect a unique...

Asking retrospective questions about consumption and income has become an important part of household surveys and research in developing countries. While recall errors in retrospective data may generate estimation biases, the nature and the magnitude of the errors are largely unknown, especially...

This paper characterises the insurance demand in terms of the entropy of the underlying probability distribution for losses. A characterisation of this nature provides the prediction that insurance for large losses with small probabilities tends to be purchased less frequently than insurance for...

In this paper, we study the structural change occurring in Japan's post-World War II era of rapid economic growth. We use a two-sector neoclassical growth model with government policies to analyze the evolution of the Japanese economy in this period and to assess the role of such policies. Our...

We examine how households protected their livelihood against an unexpected negative shock caused by the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). We also compare HPAI with other shocks such as sickness, ceremonial events, typhoons, floods, droughts, and unemployment. We apply the augmented...