This study investigates what factors determine students' academic performance in five major economies in East Asia, using the dataset from the 2007 survey of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). We explicitly consider initial maturity differences, endogeneity of class...

In this study, we compare the association of marital satisfaction with the division of labor between husband and wife in Asia, based on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean General Social Surveys in 2006 (N = 2,346, 997, and 990, respectively). Results show that in all three countries, wives are less...

In this study, we examined the differences between smoking and drinking in regard to their associations with socioeconomic factors among about 7,000 Japanese workers. Using microdata from nationwide surveys in Japan, we estimated bivariate probit models to jointly explore how smoking and...

This study attempts to examine relative income effects on perceived happiness in three major Asian countries -- China, Japan, and Korea -- in comparison with the United Sates, on the basis of largely comparable nationwide surveys in these countries. Consistent with the results from previous...

The original version of this paper was presented at the conference on the International Social Security Project (Phase VI) organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Lisbon, Portugal, on May 28-29, 2010. We are grateful for the useful comments from participants at the...