Previous studies have found that self-employed workers with long business tenure earn less than other workers with similar characteristics. This difference in earnings can be explained by the compensating wage differential theory when self-employed jobs have attractive non-earnings aspects....

The widespread use of illicit substances by American teenagers has attracted the interest of both the public and academic researchers. Among the various factors that people believe influence youth substance use, peer effects are identified as a critical determinant; substance use is considered a...

This paper attempts to estimate the causal effect of public capital stock on production using Japanese prefectural data. We first articulate the difficulty of consistently estimating the regional-level production function with public capital due to the endogeneity of the public capital stock...

Both human capital accumulation and Lazear contracts can explain the raising wage of salary/wage worker through job experience or tenure. To distinguish between these two effects, Lazear and Moore (1984) used self-employed workers' wage growth to partial out the effect of human capital...

Are workers in modern economies working too hard – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime...

As the third-largest economy in the world and a precursor of global trends in population aging, Japan's recent experiences provide important lessons regarding how demographic shifts affect the labor market and individuals' economic well-being. On the whole, the labor market showed a remarkable...

Abstract This paper attempts to shed light on the mechanism behind the lower rate of self-employment (SE) among African Americans compared with whites. Both consumer discrimination and discrimination in the credit market, combined with anti-discrimination law enforcement in the salary/wage (SW)...

The statutory minimum wage has steadily increased for decades in Japan, while the median wage has fallen nominally since 1999 because of a severe recession. We use large micro-data sets from two government surveys to investigate how the minimum wage has affected the wage distribution under...

This paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected female employment in Japan. Our estimates indicate that the employment rate of married women with children decreased by 4 percentage points, while that of those without children decreased by only 1 percentage point, implying that increased...