After the introduction of public long-term care insurance in 2000, for-profit facilities were allowed to enter the at-home care market in Japan, where nonprofits are dominant. However, according to a popular hypothesis called the "contract failure," nonprofit centers are preferred over...

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...

We observed a remarkable increase in elderly care expenses in Japan after the introduction of public elderly care insurance in 2000. This study explores the possibility that a greater number of care providers under the deregulation of the entry policy stimulated care utilization. We take...

A number of hypotheses have been proposed to examine why Japan's household saving rate was high. This paper takes advantage of a micro-level data from Public Opinion Survey on Household Financial Assets and Liabilities to reexamine the effects of the bonus system on households' savings. We find...

Japan's employee-based corporate governance is in a far-reaching transition, and has a larger presence of outside directors as board members in the 1990s. We examine how board composition affects measures for employment downsizing by constructing a unique firm-level measurement of excess...

The Japanese economy has experienced price deflation since the mid-1990s. Despite the importance of overcoming deflation, there has been little recent research on price expectations in Japan. This paper takes advantage of an original and rich quarterly household-level data set from the "Kokumin...

This paper investigates determinants and impacts of R&D activities in overseas subsidiaries, using .rm-level panel data for Japanese multinational enterprises. We distinguish between overseas innovative and adaptive R&D according to survey responses and .nd substantial di.erences between the two...

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,...