This paper investigates whether Japanese people were happy and unhappy with the general election conducted on September 11, 2005, in which the Prime Minister, Koizumi, won a landslide victory. We conducted a large survey just after the election to ask people how happy they were and which party...

This paper derives a basic formula for the measure of social welfare, a second order approximation to the difference of the value of the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function between the socially optimal resource allocation and the one in the present suboptimal economy. We discuss pros and...

We use micro data on young married households from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers in order to analyze the importance of borrowing constraints in Japan. We find (1) that 8 to 15 percent of young married Japanese households are borrowing-constrained, (2) that household assets and the...

We study dominant strategy implementation especially in economic environments. We first show that in general environments, strategy-proofness and quasi-strong-non-bossiness together are necessary and sufficient for dominant strategy implementation via the associated direct revelationmechanism....

We theoretically analyze the effects of a child allowance, an improvement in the efficiency of child rearing and a labor income tax on the fertility rate and per capita consumption. The effects on per capita consumption are opposite in the absence, and the presence, of unemployment. For example,...

After the burst of the bubble economy, Japanese economy has been changed drastically. Traditionally, Japanese economy was characterized as a bank-centered economy, but the banking system did not function well in the 1990's. Responding to banking problems, the Japanese government initiated the...

In the marriage problem (two-sided one-to-one matching problem), it is well-known that the weak core, the strong core and the set of stable matchings are all equivalent. This paper generalizes the above observation considering the G-weak core and the G-strong core. These are core concepts in...

This paper presents data on Japan's household saving rate, considers the reasons for Japan's high household saving rate in the past and the reasons for the recent decline therein, projects future trends in Japan's household saving rate, and consider the implications of my findings. It finds that...

This paper discusses an aspect of computational complexity in social choice theory. We consider the problem of designing voting rules, which is formulated in terms of simple games. We prove that it is an NP-complete problem to decide whether a given simple game is stable, or not.

Using a competitive two-country two-commodity monetary model with optimizing agents in which persistent unemployment arises, this paper examines the effects of trade restrictions on consumption and employment in the two countries. When facing unemployment, a country tends to impose an import...