There are a number of indications that Japanese job security laws have been relaxed since the end of the 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to establish causality between job security laws and firing costs in the Japanese labor market. The analysis first investigates when and how firing costs...

Japan consists of many small inhabited islands in addition to four main islands. We examine the impact of fiscal expenditure and the number of tourists on per capita taxable income in remote islands using panel data analysis. The results show that both fiscal expenditure and population size have...

We have analyzed the determinants of the Gini coefficient for income and expenditure. In both cases, we do not find support for the Kuznets inverted-U hypothesis. From economic globalization viewpoint, the opening of goods markets reduces income inequality both in the short run (the Gini...

In Japan, some fishery cooperative associations use their fishery harbor names as a brand to differentiate their own shore fish. Most notable is the branding of mackerel. In this paper, we analyze the effects of branding using a discrete/continuous model. The results are as follows. First, there...

The life cycle/permanent income hypothesis (LCPIH) makes two postulates: people behave with rational expectations, and people do not have self-control problems. If either or both of these postulates do not apply, we cannot obtain a testable implication of the LCPIH. We use Japanese panel data...

From the theoretical point of view, households consumption inequality represents the inequality of the expected utilities through their lifecycles if each family optimizes its lifetime utility. We investigate its empirical validity, applying a regression analysis. The result of the regression...

Several models are proposed for analyzing consumer demand systems. Empirical researchers usually, adopt one or more models and test some constraints based on demand theory, and then evaluate the plausibility of the models. However, they rarely adopt a statistical model selection procedure in...

Using a disequilibrium model, we investigate the relationship between the supply constraint of electricity generation capacity and electricity demand in Taiwan. We find that electricity consumption faced supply constraints in Taiwan between 1959 and 1972, but that generation capacity grew...

We propose simple modifications for the Kakwani tax progressivity measure that make it suitable for evaluating access inequality for medical services. Our modification is to measure inequality using the ratio of the concentration index to the Gini coefficient instead of the difference between...