This paper explored how the degree of female spouses’ political interest affects male spouses’ views about women’s empowerment, using individual level data in Japan. Controlling for unobserved area-specific fixed effects, results showed that males were likely to consider women’s...

This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the years 1979 and 1996 to examine how the relationship between government size and life satisfaction changes. The major findings are: (1) Government size has a detrimental effect on life satisfaction when government size impedes economic growth...

Using Japanese panel data for 2006-2009, this study attempts to examine how the pass rate of law school student taking the new bar examination influences the number of applicants for the law school in the following years. The major finding is that the higher the law school student pass rate, the...

In the Japanese Professional Baseball League, the starting pitcher is announced prior to the game in the Pacific League but not in the Central League. I attempt to investigate how the release of information concerning a starting pitcher prior to the game affects attendance. My major findings...

This paper explores the relationship of social capital to self-rated health status in Japan, and how this is affected by the labor market. Data of 3075 adult participants in the 2000 Social Policy and Social Consciousness (SPSC) survey were used. Controlling for endogenous bias, the main finding...

This paper uses individual level data (the Japanese General Social Survey, 2001) to examine how government size influences generalized trust. After controlling for income inequality, population mobility, city size and various individual characteristics, I found: (1) Using all samples, government...

The lay judge system, a quasi-jury system, was introduced in Japan from May 2009. This paper attempts to analyze Japanese people’s attitude towards this system by examining whether they show a willingness to serve as a lay judge. The major findings from regression analysis are: (1) In general,...

We use OECD members' data to ascertain that new-born technological inventions increase the degree of inequality but that this declines as the technology disperses into the overall economy (e.g., Galor and Tsiddon, 1997; Weil, 2005). Therefore, we show explicitly that Kuznets curve does not converge...

This paper attempts to examine how social trust influences human capital formation using prefectural level data in Japan. To this end, I constructed a proxy for social trust, based on the Japanese General Social Surveys. After controlling for socioeconomic factors, I found that social trust...

This paper uses individual level data (the Japanese General Social Surveys 2000-2003) to examine how socio-economic status influences own and spouse’s earnings. After controlling for own and spouse’s characteristics such as human capital and age, I found: (1) childhood economic condition...