New economic geography focuses on the impact of falling transport costs on the spatial distribution of activities. However, it disregards the role of technological innovations, which are central to modern economic growth, as well as the role of migration costs, which are a strong impediment to...

This paper develops a new scheme for improving an approximation method of a probability density function, which is inspired by the idea in <I>best approximation in an inner product space</I>. Moreover, we applies "Dykstra's cyclic projections algorithm" for its implementation. Numerical examples for...</i>

This paper develops a general pricing method for multi-asset cross currency options, whose underlying asset consists of multiple different assets, and the evaluation currency is different from the ones used in the most liquid market of each asset; the examples include cross currency options,...

This paper considers likelihood-based testing of the null hypothesis of <em>m0</em> components against the alternative of <em>m</em>0+1 components in a finite mixture model. The number of components is an important parameter in the applications of finite mixture models. Still, testing the number of components has...

This article empirically analyzes consumer behavior of watching TV dramas via case-based decision theory. This theory models consumer decision under uncertainty in product quality, based on subjective evaluations of previous purchases for similar goods. Our empirical analysis is concerned with...</i>

This paper evaluates the 1999 national income tax reform in Japan by comparing the social marginal costs of public funds (SMCFs) for changing the marginal tax rates in different income brackets before the reform occurred. To do so, we estimate the discrete choice model of labor supply using a...

There are more than 1,700 municipalities serving as insurers in Japan's system of National Health Insurance (NHI). The NHI has several institutional routes to buffer local premiums from abrupt changes in regional health demands that destabilize the NHI benefit expenditures. After briefly...

This paper is concerned with estimation of a predictive density with parametric constraints under Kullback-Leibler loss. When an invariance structure is embed- ded in the problem, general and unied conditions for the minimaxity of the best equivariant predictive density estimator are derived....

In this paper, we have studied the pricing of a continuously collateralized CDS. We have made use of the "survival measure" to derive the pricing formula in a straightforward way. As a result, we have found that there exists irremovable trace of the counter party as well as the investor in the...

Forecasting welfare caseloads has grown in importance in Japan because of their recent rapid increase. Given that the forecasting literature on welfare caseloads only focuses on US cases and utilizes limited classes of forecasting models, this study employs multiple alternative methods in order...