In Japan, as in other developed countries, smoking rates have been decreasing among men but it has been increasing among women. The prevalence of smoking may relate to accompanying gender differences in the labor market. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine how occupation affects...

...

We provide a necessary and a sufficient condition on an individual's expected utility function under which any zero-mean idiosyncratic risk increases cautiousness (the derivative of the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion), which is the key determinant for this individual's demand for...

This paper empirically examines the development of credit allocation amongst Japanese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and the relationship between credit allocation and economic efficiency. We first investigate whether the credit market is inefficient, in that the survival of...

...

The use of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a costly high-tech treatment for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), is much more frequent in Japan than in other developed countries, resulting in large medical expenditure. Using chart-based data from the Tokai...