Do education vouchers prevent dropout at private high schools? Evidence from Japanese policy changes

Although education voucher programs for students attending private high schools have existed in Japan for decades, to date there have been no studies that examine their effectiveness. In this study, we estimate the programs’ preventative effect on dropout by using school-track level (academic or vocational) panel data covering all high schools in northern Japan. Prefectural governments have faced increasing dropout rates stemming from financial difficulties, and expanded the scope and amount of their private high school tuition support programs since the late 1990s. We use this variation to identify the effect of tuition support on students’ dropout decisions, controlling for initial academic ability of students entering the schools and unobservable school-track effects. We also apply the instrumental variable method to account for the possible endogeneity of policy changes. Our results suggest that increasing tuition support is particularly effective in preventing the dropout of private high school students on nonacademic tracks.     

Endogenous party structure

This paper proposes a model of two-party representative democracy on a single-dimensional political space, in which voters choose their parties in order to influence the parties’ choices of representative. After two candidates are selected as the median of each party’s support group, Nature determines the candidates’ relative likability (valence). Based on the candidates’ political positions and relative likability, voters vote for the preferable candidate without being tied to their party’s choice. We show that (1) there exists a nontrivial equilibrium under natural conditions, and (2) the equilibrium party border and the ex ante probabilities of the two-party candidates winning are sensitive to the distribution of voters. In particular, we show that if a party has a more concentrated subgroup, then the party tends to alienate its centrally located voters, and the party’s probability of winning the final election is reduced. Even if voter distribution is symmetric, an extremist party (from either side) can emerge as voters become more politically divided.     

Asymptotics of the probability of minimizing ‘down-side’ risk under partial information

We consider minimizing the probability of falling below a target growth rate of the wealth process up to a time horizon T in an incomplete market model under partial information and then study the asymptotic behavior of the minimizing probability as T → ∞. This problem is closely related to an ergodic risk-sensitive stochastic control problem under partial information in the risk-averse case. Indeed, in our main theorem we relate the former problem to the latter as its dual. As a result we obtain an explicit expression for the limit value of the former problem in the case of linear Gaussian models.     

Transshipments and inventories in the Takayama-Judge model

This paper shows that the Takayama-Judge model to solve interregional and intertemporal market equilibrium conditions faces difficulties when transshipments take place and that the difficulties relating to inventories, pointed out by Guise and others in this Journal, are special cases relating to transshipments. These difficulties can be overcome, simply by relaxing the non-negativity condition imposed on x_ii(t) terms in the material balance conditions.