The evidence for the effects of early childhood education on risky behavior in adolescence is limited. This paper studies the consequences of a reform of a large-scale universal kindergarten program in Japan. Exploiting a staggered expansion of kindergartens across regions, we estimate the...

This paper studies how the establishment of Nuclear Power Facilities (NPF) in the 1970s and 1980s has affected local per capita income levels in NPF-located municipalities in Japan by using the synthetic control method (SCM). Eight quantitative case studies using the SCM clarify that the effects...

This paper studies how the establishment of Nuclear Power Facilities (NPF) in the 1970s and 1980s has affected local per capita income levels in NPF-located municipalities in Japan by using the synthetic control method (SCM). Eight quantitative case studies using the SCM clarify that the effects...

Using a data set on housing sales transactions we explore the potential effect of the Fukushima disaster on housing prices in Sweden. In contrast to most earlier findings in other countries we do not find any disproportionate effect from the Fukushima disaster on housing prices in vicinity of...

In a Regression Kink (RK) design with a finite sample, a confounding smooth nonlinear relationship between an assignment variable and an outcome variable around a threshold can be spuriously picked up as a kink and result in a biased estimate. In order to investigate how well RK designs handle...

This paper investigates the effects of fiscal equalization grants on total expenditure and disaggregated expenditures by exploiting two different formula-based exogenous variations in grants. Examining the institutional settings of the Japanese fiscal equalization scheme and estimating local...

This paper examines whether tax mimicking occurs among municipalities in the setting of health insurance tax levels in Japan. To uncover the effects of strategic mimicking behavior among neighboring municipalities, we exploit the fact that insurance tax levels sharply dropped when municipalities...

Although a public long-term care (LTC) program is a potentially important factor for the labor supply of female informal caregivers, there are only a handful of individual-level studies on this topic and the macro-level impacts of LTC programs are still largely unknown. Exploiting the...