One of the most important purposes of Japan's introduction of public long-term care insurance in 2000 was to diminish the care burden at home, which traditionally depends heavily on women. This study takes advantage of unique micro-level information to examine whether the care burden has...

Japanese households in urban areas have suffered from a shortage of child care supply, especially for children age 0 to 2. Moreover, the bottleneck of child care is expected to grow more severe, due to a hike in demand for child care accompanied by an increase in female labor supply. This study...

Yen depreciation is often proposed to combat the deflation in Japan. However, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on how price expectation is affected by currency depreciation. This paper focuses on an unusual experience in Okinawan history to evaluate the effect of devaluation...

The Japanese economy has suffered from deflation since the mid-1990s. Despite the importance of overcoming deflation for policymakers and academics in Japan, there has been no recent research on what changes deflationary expectations in Japan. This study emphasizes fact-finding from a unique and...

This paper evaluates the quality and efficiency of the at-home long-term care market in Japan, a market in which for-profit enterprises were allowed to enter after the introduction of the long-term care insurance in Spring of 2000. We take advantage of data from a unique self-conducted survey to...

This is the first study to take advantage of Japan's public long-term care insurance as a unique and natural experiment to evaluate how outsourcing long-term care spurs female labor supply. We utilize our unusual and rich panel data from households with an elderly person who needs care and who...

An increase in female labor force participation is indispensable to maintain sustainable economic growth in Japan, whose population is experiencing rapid aging and a decline in fertility. One remedy to these problems that is often proposed to be effective in stimulating the female labor supply...

Japan's total fertility rate declined to 1.32 in 2002, the lowest in its modern era. Such a drastic decline in fertility rate is an exception in the world. What the decrease in birthrate brings is an unbalanced demographic composition between a productive and dependent population. This...

We investigate how people coped with unexpected losses caused by the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake by using some unusually rich household data. Several empirical findings emerged. We found that the coping means were specific to the nature of the loss caused by the earthquake. For example,...

It is not well known that Okinawa suffers from a severe shortage of child care services, even among non-urban areas in Japan. This study is the first to take advantage of some unusually rich micro-level data to address to quantitative assessment of quality of child care and estimates of...