A reconciliation between equity and efficiency in public goods economy

Journal of Economics -     

Health and Income Variation – A Panel Data Study on the Developed and Less Developed Economies

In this paper, human capital in the form of ‘health status’ is introduced into a neoclassical economic growth model as one of the main factors differentiating rich and poor countries. Various panel data models are used to examine how health and other growth factors affect average income in different countries. Our main empirical finding indicates that a one-year increase in life expectancy (the health status measure) raises GDP per capita by 0.5–0.9%. Based on this result, a baseline health status can be established to help poor countries achieve a targeted economic growth rate.     

Appraising Unhappiness in the Wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake

Considering the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we use the experienced‐utility approach to appraise the psychological distress from disaster‐related news. We take advantage of the serendipitous timing of our original nationwide weekly panel survey that became a fitting resource for the investigation of subjective well‐being in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Although all of Japanese society was affected, we found geographical heterogeneity between the affected areas (Sendai and Tokyo) and the unaffected areas in terms of mental costs. Our finding reminds us of the focusing effect (Kahneman et al., 2006 ; Dolan and Kahneman, 2008 ) as captured by Schkade and Kahneman ( 1998 ) in the maxim “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it”.     

A new computational tool for analysing dynamic hedging under transaction costs

This paper highlights a framework for analysing dynamic hedging strategies under transaction costs. First, self-financing portfolio dynamics under transaction costs are modelled as being portfolio affine. An algorithm for computing the moments of the hedging error on a lattice under portfolio affine dynamics is then presented. In a number of circumstances, this provides an efficient approach to analysing the performance of hedging strategies under transaction costs through moments. As an example, this approach is applied to the hedging of a European call option with a Black–Scholes delta hedge and Leland's adjustment for transaction costs. Results are presented that demonstrate the range of analysis possible within the presented framework.     

Pricing Discrete Barrier Options Under Stochastic Volatility

This paper proposes a new approximation method for pricing barrier options with discrete monitoring under stochastic volatility environment. In particular, the integration-by-parts formula and the duality formula in Malliavin calculus are effectively applied in pricing barrier options with discrete monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one that shows an analytical approximation for pricing discrete barrier options with stochastic volatility models. Furthermore, it provides numerical examples for pricing double barrier call options with discrete monitoring under Heston and λ-SABR models.     

A trend filtering method closely related to $$\ell _{1}$$ trend filtering

The filtering method developed by Kim et al. (SIAM Rev 51:339–360, 2009), \(\ell _{1}\) trend filtering, is attractive because it enables us to estimate a continuous piecewise linear trend. This paper introduces a new filtering method closely related to \(\ell _{1}\) trend filtering in order to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge on \(\ell _{1}\) trend filtering. We show that the piecewise linearity, which is the key feature of \(\ell _{1}\) trend filtering, is derived from the new filtering. For this reason, we refer to the filtering as ‘pure’ \(\ell _{1}\) trend filtering. We also demonstrate some other miscellaneous results concerning the new filtering.     

Stock price targeting and fiscal deficit in Japan: Why did the fiscal deficit increase during Japan’s lost decades?

The purpose of this paper is to explain why Japan’s fiscal deficit increased so dramatically in the 1990s and the 2000s. We focus on the role of “stock price targeting” to explain why the fiscal expenditure increased so much. After presenting a simple model to describe government behavior with an optimistic view about stock price and output growth, the paper tests whether the model can explain Japan’s fiscal expenditure. The empirical results, using biannual and high-frequency data of the 1990s and the 2000s, show that the stock price targeting can track Japan’s fiscal expenditure reasonably well, especially in the 1990s. They imply that without the stock price targeting, the total amount of biannual fiscal stimulus from 1992 to 2000 would have been lower by 2.5 trillion yen on average.     

Why Tour Guiding is Important for Ecotourism: Enhancing Guiding Quality with the Ecotourism Promotion Policy in Japan

The Ecotourism Promotion Policy in Japan requires tour guiding to be employed, although it provides little rationale for it. This paper reviews the literature to illustrate why tour guiding is important for achieving policy and ecotourism goals in order to support this requirement. An overview of ecotourism policy in Japan is provided, contributions of tour guiding to achieving the policy and ecotourism goals are described, and approaches to strengthening current practices along with the policy are discussed. It is suggested that non-profit organizations offer training to impart knowledge about guiding roles and interpretation at a national level and that ecotourism promotion councils teach knowledge about ecotour products and tourists at a regional level.     

Real interest rate equalization: some empirical evidence from the three major world financial markets

This article examines the linkage of real interest rates of the three major world financial markets (USA, Japan and the UK) with the use of cointegration methods. Unlike previous works, the investigation uses a trivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) model in which a constant term in the common stochastic trends space is excluded. Based on data generated after the liberalization of Japan's foreign exchange market at the end of 1980 (1981:1–1998:12), the article finds some empirical evidence indicating that the extent of the departure from the long-run real interest rate equalization (RIE) is not very large, although the null hypothesis of the long-run RIE is rejected in most cases.     

Application of Homotopy Analysis Method to Option Pricing Under Lévy Processes

Option pricing under the Lévy process has been considered an important research direction in the field of financial engineering, where a closed-form expression for the standard European option is available due to the existence of analytically tractable characteristic function according to the Lévy–Khinchin representation. However, this approach cannot be applied to exotic derivatives (such as barrier options) directly, although a large volume of exotic derivatives are actively traded in the current options market. An alternative approach is to solve the corresponding partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) numerically, which is, in fact, time-consuming and is not computationally tractable in general. In this paper, we apply the so-called homotopy analysis method (HAM) to solve the corresponding PIDE in a semi analytic form, being obtained from the following three steps: (1) Apply the Fourier transform to convert the PIDE to an ordinal differential equitation (ODE), and construct a differential system of ODEs. (2) Solve the system of ODEs, where each differential equation is shown to have an analytical solution. (3) Express the option price using the sum of infinite series, where each term may be expressed analytically and derived by applying Steps (1) and (2) recursively. To illustrate our technique more precisely, we take the variance gamma model as an example and provide the semi-analytic form. Numerical examples demonstrate a fast convergence of our proposed method to the prices of European and down-and-out call options with a few number of terms. Note that this method is easy to implement and can be applied to other types of options under general Lévy processes.