Partial Communication in a Voluntary‐Contribution‐Mechanism Experiment

This paper presents results of a voluntary‐contribution‐mechanism experiment with partial communication. It was found that the trend of mean investments depended on whether a communication network was connected and on how fast all subjects could share information. When each subject could communicate with two other subjects and the network was connected, the mean investment increased from 33 percent to 58 percent of the optimal investment. On the other hand, when each subject could communicate with only one other subject and the network was not connected, the mean investment decreased from 34 percent to 19 percent of the optimal investment.     

Bartlett correction to the likelihood ratio test for MCAR with two‐step monotone sample

Assuming that two‐step monotone missing data is drawn from a multivariate normal population, this paper derives the Bartlett‐type correction to the likelihood ratio test for missing completely at random (MCAR), which plays an important role in the statistical analysis of incomplete datasets. The advantages of our approach are confirmed in Monte Carlo simulations. Our correction drastically improved the accuracy of the type I error in Little's (1988, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 83 , 1198–1202) test for MCAR and performed well even on moderate sample sizes.     

On the relationship between the provision of waste management service and illegal dumping

The illegal dumping of waste has been a serious environmental concern of most countries in the world. This paper examines the relationship between the provision of waste treatment facilities and the frequency of illegal dumping. Our results show that a shortage of intermediate waste treatment facilities has played an important role in increasing the frequency of illegal dumping.     

Price-Earnings Ratios in Japan: Recent Evidence and Further Results

We analyse the disparity between Japanese and US price-earnings ratios between 1975 and 1995 with a view to find if the accounting differences between two countries can explain this disparity. Our results indicate that the accounting differences can explain a significant part but not all differences between Japanese and US price-earnings ratios. We further investigate the effect of other possible economic factors on the behaviour of Japanese price-earnings ratios and find that changing expectations about growth opportunities, changes in the real returns and differing inflation also do not fully explain the behaviour of the price-earnings ratios. Therefore, the possibility of the existence of the speculative bubble needs to be explored to fully explain the behaviour of Japanese share price-earnings ratios during this period.     

Organizational dynamics and aggregate fluctuations: The role of financial relationships

This paper constructs an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study the role of labor reallocation between production and organizational tasks within a firm in movements in measured TFP in Japan. Allocating more labor to organizational tasks strengthens the financial relationship with financial intermediaries and helps firms to mitigate a widening in credit spread during financial difficulties. However, doing so reduces the labor allocated to production tasks and hence the measured TFP. Our quantitative analysis indicates that labor reallocation contributes to the observed procyclicality in measured TFP. We also find that this mechanism amplifies and propagates the effects of exogenous shocks on aggregate activity.     

Human capital investment,credentialing, and wage differentials

This study considers how individuals determine at what ratio they will invest in two different types of education. The first type contributes to the development of labor skills, while the other does not. We refer to the former as human capital investment and the latter as unproductive investment, which improves test scores but has no beneficial effect on students' human capital. We formulate an overlapping‐generations economy in which the rich and poor households invest in both types of education. We find that the ratio of human capital investment to unproductive investment is lower in the economy with medium size of the wage differentials. In a dynamic analysis, we identify two patterns of stable steady states for the dynamics of the wage differentials, namely, no‐inequality and high‐inequality steady states. Further, we show that a rapid increase in the level of skill‐biased technology may cause a switch from a steady state with no‐inequality to one with high inequality. This causes at least a temporary increase in the ratio of unproductive investment during the transition to the new steady state.     

Testing block‐diagonal covariance structure for high‐dimensional data

A test statistic is developed for making inference about a block‐diagonal structure of the covariance matrix when the dimensionality p exceeds n, where n = N ? 1 and N denotes the sample size. The suggested procedure extends the complete independence results. Because the classical hypothesis testing methods based on the likelihood ratio degenerate when p > n, the main idea is to turn instead to a distance function between the null and alternative hypotheses. The test statistic is then constructed using a consistent estimator of this function, where consistency is considered in an asymptotic framework that allows p to grow together with n. The suggested statistic is also shown to have an asymptotic normality under the null hypothesis. Some auxiliary results on the moments of products of multivariate normal random vectors and higher‐order moments of the Wishart matrices, which are important for our evaluation of the test statistic, are derived. We perform empirical power analysis for a number of alternative covariance structures.     

An integrated model of tourists’ time use and expenditure behaviour with self-selection based on a fully nested Archimedean copula function

This study presents an integrated model of tourists’ time use, expenditure by explicitly incorporating the influence of destination visit behaviour based on the concept of self-selection. Inter-destination interactions (between time-use decisions, between expenditure decisions, and between decisions on both time use and expenditure) are incorporated by using a multilinear utility function. The study uses a Type-II Tobit model with a Frank-type fully nested Archimedean copula to deal with issues caused by correlation between these variables. The Archimedean copula is used to combine marginal distributions to obtain a joint distribution of error terms of utility functions with the help of dependency parameters. The effectiveness of the model is confirmed empirically by using data collected in the Tottori Prefecture of Japan in 2007. Dependence structures across destinations, inter-destination interactions and the relative importance of each destination in decisions are examined.     

Hierarchical system of road networks with inward, outward, and through traffic

This paper formulates a continuous model of a grid road network for determining the optimal hierarchical system of road networks. The hierarchical system is represented as the proportions of area taken up by roads at each level of the hierarchy. The objective is to derive the optimal ratio of road areas that minimizes the total travel time. The model explicitly incorporates inward, outward, and through traffic as well as inner traffic to examine how traffic composition affects the optimal ratio of road areas. The result reveals that the optimal ratio of major arterial roads increases with inward, outward and through traffic.