The 1990s crash in Japan's stock and land market should have had adverse effects on household consumption. This paper takes advantage of a panel data from Japanese households to evaluate the impacts of the wealth gains or losses on households' spending. We obtain the following empirical...

How do people determine their levels of consumption? This question has attracted much attention; not only is it important in its own right, but it is also related to economic trends and macroeconomic policies. The life cycle/permanent income hypothesis has been regarded as the most important...

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...

We investigate the impact of road construction on economic growth using the Japanese prefectural data for the period 1960-1999. Our main findings are as follows. The construction of major roads forming the nationwide network had a positive effect on growth in less developed regions over the...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the Special Credit Guarantee to Small Firms enforced from 1998 to 2001 in Japan. We collected data set on small firms in Hokkaido prefecture to compare the firms that used the Special Credit Guarantee and those that did not. Our empirical findings...

Though the Japanese government has established several economic policies concerning the promotion of IT investment (including investment tax credit (ITC) from 2003 FY), there are few academic papers on IT investment in Japan. It is thus important to analyze empirically which factors affect IT...

1. Background There have been oppositions to and doubts on additional quantitative monetary easing after nominal short-term rates hit zero, mainly led by the central bankers and financial market participants. This paper critically examines the robustness of their views from various aspects. 2....

As the household sector as a whole is very heterogeneous, it is necessary to separate more homogeneous groups within the sector (United Nations et al. "System of National Accounts 1993"19.9). In this paper by sub-sectors of elderly households according to size of income the income and outlay...

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...