This paper examines whether consumption reacts to an anticipated income increase arising from the start of pension benefit payments. Using household-level data, the analysis indicates that although consumption increases significantly in the year that pension benefit payouts start, it falls back...

Many people have been skeptical about the economic value of going to graduate school in Japan. However, there are few empirical studies to analyze this issue. This paper estimates the private internal rate of return to postgraduate education and assesses the postgraduate wage premium in Japan....

This paper examines how firms’ decision to start exporting is affected by the availability of information on export markets. Unlike existing studies which focus on information sharing among firms, we are interested in the information provided by firms’ main bank. Specifically, using a unique...

It is generally found that overeducated (undereducated) workers earn less (more) than their correctly placed colleagues and reported that the return to year of overeducation, though positive, is smaller than the return to year of required education. Overeducation (undereducation) refers to the...

This paper attempted to measure the causal effect of high school quality on academic achievement by estimating education production function in Japan. The authors combined school quality measures retrieved from official statistics with the large sample of twins collected through the web-based...

This study examines how Japanese consumers’ inflation expectations are formed by the use of micro-level dataset of the prediction error of expected inflation rate. Recently in Japan, the interest is growing in the policies that intend to work on the inflation expectations of consumers and...

For thirty years since Beveridge and Nelson (1981) decomposition, many decomposition of trend and cycle have been developed. Their estimation, however, have little correspondence with each other. This paper applies to Japanese real GDP and unemployment rate between 1955 and 2000 using...

In this paper we present a methodology to deal with trends in DSGE models. This type of models have consequences for long run growth as well as for cyclical dynamics and it would be desirable to deal with both aspects in an unified frame-work. Two different problems need to be addressed. The...

The economic damage caused by the Tokyo Inland Earthquake disaster is estimated at 112 trillion yen by the Central Disaster Management Council of Japan. The estimated figure however is surrounded by so much uncertainty that there surely exists a risk of the actual damage caused by an earthquake...

Multinational corporations (MNCs), both wholly-foreign and joint ventures, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) often had higher labor productivity and lower capital productivity than local, private firms in Vietnamese manufacturing during 2000-2006. After controlling for firm-level variation in...