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 OECD countries between 1971 and 2008....

This paper attempts to test the morale theory of nominal wage rigidity by identifying the causal effect of pay cuts on workers' income satisfaction and work morale. This paper uses the current deflationary recession in Japan to estimate this causal effect. Our original survey of Japanese firms...

Previous studies have found that self-employed workers with long business tenure earn less than other workers with similar characteristics. This difference in earnings can be explained by the compensating wage differential theory when self-employed jobs have attractive non-earnings aspects....

The widespread use of illicit substances by American teenagers has attracted the interest of both the public and academic researchers. Among the various factors that people believe influence youth substance use, peer effects are identified as a critical determinant; substance use is considered a...

This paper attempts to estimate the causal effect of public capital stock on production using Japanese prefectural data. We first articulate the difficulty of consistently estimating the regional-level production function with public capital due to the endogeneity of the public capital stock...

Both human capital accumulation and Lazear contracts can explain the raising wage of salary/wage worker through job experience or tenure. To distinguish between these two effects, Lazear and Moore (1984) used self-employed workers' wage growth to partial out the effect of human capital...

Are workers in modern economies working too hard – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime...

As the third-largest economy in the world and a precursor of global trends in population aging, Japan's recent experiences provide important lessons regarding how demographic shifts affect the labor market and individuals' economic well-being. On the whole, the labor market showed a remarkable...

The statutory minimum wage has steadily increased for decades in Japan, while the median wage has fallen nominally since 1999 because of a severe recession. We use large micro-data sets from two government surveys to investigate how the minimum wage has affected the wage distribution under...

This paper examines how expected attachment to the labor market and expected tenure at a specific firm affect training participation. The results, based on cross-sectional data from Japan, indicate that expected attachment to the labor market affects participation in both employer- and...