Functional foods have continuously spread in many countries. Japan is one of the largest functional food market in the world and the government approves them by scientific evidences. The country has managed functional food policies for around 30 years so that consumers in Japan are familiar with...

In causal mediation analysis, identification of existing causal direct or indirect effects requires untestable assumptions in which potential outcomes and potential mediators are independent.This paper defines a new causal direct and indirect effect that does not require the untestable...

Despite organic food being deemed to include environmental and health attributes, few studies have examined the perception regarding organic food from the scanner panel data. Considering the hike in the value-added tax (VAT) implemented by the Japanese government in April 2014 as a natural...

We quantify the effects of heavy discounts for certain categories known as loss leading in the supermarket industry. Retailers were quasi-randomly assigned to the likelihood of loss leading due to the Hokkaido East Iburi Earthquake that struck Japan in September 2018. Combining this with a...