Substantial improvement in health conditions during 35 years from 1970 to 2005 has made Japan one of the top countries for longevity in the world. This paper tries to quantify value of the improvement by willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a decline in death rate during the period, following Murphy and...

This paper tries to quantitatively examine the impact of intergenerational transfers on asset inequality among Japanese households. For that purpose, we estimate an intergenerational asset transfer function with various control variables, using a unique micro dataset taken from the "Household...

Implementing public policy for the management of low-probability/high-consequence disasters is problematic. There is no implicit normative rule for setting investment priority to reduce the impact of such rare disasters, since it is difficult to recognize the benefit of the investment. Current...

This paper proposes a new method to estimate parameters, natural rates, and business cycles of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models simultaneously and consistently. It is based on the Monte Carlo particle filter and a self-organizing state space model. In our method, we estimate the...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest cash or near-cash U.S. antipoverty program. Taxpayers gain access to the EITC by having incomes below certain thresholds and by filing a tax return. For a taxpayer to receive a larger EITC available to families with children, the EITC-qualifying...

Recently, the damage estimations for the anticipated Tokyo Inland Earthquake released by the Center of Disaster Management Council assumed extensive damage, including a death toll of approximately 11,000 people, the collapse of 850,000 buildings, and a maximum economic loss of 112 trillion yen...

We constructed an overlapping-generations model with endogenous fertility to analyze the effect of child benefits and pensions on welfare for current and future generations. The following results were obtained. First, when financial sustainability is not taken into account, the best policy to...

We shall discuss the possibility of improving the current estimation method of Japanese Quarterly GDP. We re-consider the current estimation method of Fixed Investment and Inventory Investments, and the current seasonal adjustment practice. We shall propose some statistical ways in the view of...

The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) took note of the Copenhagen Accord inDecember 2009, in which each country was requested to provide her target of reductionin greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 to the United Nations Framework Convention onClimate Change (UNFCC). Japanese Government was...

Japanese farmers have been encouraged to diversify into agriculture-related activities, such as processing agricultural products and managing restaurants, in order to increase their income since the early 1990s. This paper examines the effect of agriculture-related activities on total factor...