In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the consumption and income taxes from the viewpoints of efficiency and equity, we evaluate the past and present structure of Japan's consumption and income taxes, we consider the role of the consumption tax in stimulating the economy, in...

This paper examines the role of peer effects in smoking behavior using data of middle and high school students in the United States. I present a random utility model that explicitly incorporates complementarity between individual and peer smokings. A Markov process model of smoking interactions...

The underlying causes of sharp declines in bank lending during recessions in large developed economies, as exemplified by the U.S. in the early 1990s and Japan in the late 1990s, are still being debated due to a lack of any convincing identification strategy of the supply side capital-lending...

We study the political economy of labour market policies. First, it is shown that tax and redistributive considerations lead inside workers to prefer spending on active labour market programmes to passive spending, e.g., on unemployment benefits. We also show that greater active spending may be...

This paper reports the results of informational cascades experiments where two different decision-making systems, anti-seniority and seniority are investigated. By implementing heterogeneous signal qualities associated with the fixed order of decisions I compare the property of each system and...

In this paper, we consider a problem in environmental policy design by applying optimal stopping rules. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal timings at which the government should adopt environmental policies to deal with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and to reduce...

Many developing countries possess comparative advantage both in natural resources and in labor-intensive industries, and experience both industrial pollution and natural resource degradation. We present a model that incorporates these stylized facts together with key spatial features and...

In a two-country world economy, consumption-habit dynamics in one country are affected, due to endogenous interest rate adjustments, by the other country's habits and preferences. External indebtedness depends crucially on international differences in habit-adjusted net output less habitual...

This paper uses one-minute returns on the TOPIX and S&P500 to examine the efficiency of the Tokyo and New York Stock Exchanges. Our major finding is that Tokyo completes reactions to New York within six minutes, but New York reacts within fourteen minutes. Dividing the sample period into three...

This paper studies a monopoly pricing problem when the seller can also choose the timing of a trade with each buyer endowed with private information about the seller's good. A buyer's valuation of the good is the weighted sum of his and other buyers' private signals, and is affected by the...