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 micro-level examination of wage determinants of child care workers in Okinawa. We focus especially on two issues, which motivate us to draw...

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...

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...

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...

Exploiting an ideal experiment situation, this paper provides clear evidence of consumption smoothing against an anticipated income change. Until FY2002, Japanese public employees received large and predictable bonus payments three times a year, but the third bonus in March was abolished in...

In March, 1999, the Japanese Government handed out "shopping coupons" worth 20,000 yen (about 200 dollars) to families for every child under the age of 15 and to roughly half of Japan's elderly population. In total, 25 percent of Japan's population received the coupons. The coupons expired after...

The Japanese economy in the 1990s experienced a substantial decrease in the nominal interest rate. The positive effect on the business investment, however, should have been canceled out, since deflationary expectations raised the real cost of capital. In this study, we address this unexplored...

Part I : Consumer Response to the 1998 Tax Cut: Which of Tax Cut or Coupon Program is More Effective? The Japanese Government implemented two tax cut packages in 1998. A unique feature of the 1998 tax cuts is that the tax cut amount for each household is based on the number of family members...

Part I : New Evidence on the Response of Expenditures to Anticipated Income Changes: Panel Data Estimates on Japanese Bonus System This paper exploits a notable institutional feature of the Japanese economy, the bonus system, to test whether households in Japan smooth consumption under large and...

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...