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...

Recently the role of wages in deflation process has been rarely taken as a serious study subject in Japan. However, looking at prices in the economy as a whole from the cost side, wages are the biggest cost factor and, therefore, the development in wages should have a close relationship with the...

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...

This paper introduces the Carlson-Parkin [1975] method (henceforth, CP) and its variants, which derive an inflation expectation series using actual inflation and published aggregates from a survey on individual economic agents, to beginners. We use the survey results from the Bank of Japan's...

As the household sector as a whole is very heterogeneous economically and socially, 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 households according to size of income and net...

Due to rapid aging of the country's citizens, Japan faces an enormous long-term care future demand. To control care demand and maintain the current long-term care insurance, policies should be based on price and income elasticities obtained from empirical studies in Japan. This study is meant to...

This paper rigorously justifies the approximation of aggregate imitational behavior in large populations by the deterministic dynamics given by Bjonerstedt and Weibull. We first clarify what models fit their formulation, in which the stochastic dynamics depends only on the average frequencies of...

Japan's development of information technology (IT) is said to have lagged behind the U.S. throughout the "lost decade", as the 1990s are often described. However, if we harmonize the national accounts for the two countries, the contribution of IT to economic growth turns out to be nearly...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of policies, especially credit guarantees and governmental institution lending, to facilitate funding for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Japan in the late 1990s. We set up a panel from different Japanese prefectures from 1993 to 2001 to estimate...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the choice of invoice currency under exchange rate uncertainty. The analysis is motivated by the fact that the U.S. dollar has been the dominant vehicle currency in developing countries. The theoretical analysis is based on an open economy model of...