Domestic and international strategic interactions in environment policy formation

Summary. In this paper, we establish the most possilbe general formulation of the technology governing carbon-gas emission, giving rise to global external diseconomies, and ty to explore into the strategic interactions,both domestic and international, when an individual country decides on the environmental policies. Through the comparison among emission taxes, quotas, and standard in the perfectly competitive private economies, we find that the first two policies are equivalent but they are different in effects by virtue of what we may call the tax-exemption effect of emission standards. Such a difference in the policy effect further affects the other country's welfare through the global externalities, amplified through whether the government can precommit to either the emission tax or the emission standard. Received: January 16, 2001; revised version: April 16, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" The authors thank the valuable comments by an anonymous referee. Ministry of Education and Science for its financial support is also greatly acknowledged. Correspondence to:K. Kiyono     

PERSONAL AND REGIONAL DETERMINANTS OF OUT‐MIGRATION FROM METROPOLITAN AREAS IN JAPAN

In this study, we focus on migration from metropolitan to outside areas in Japan, and quantitatively examine the personal and regional determinants of this process. At the regional level, our results show that the determinants of migration differ depending upon whether migration occurs from smaller to larger cities or vice versa. In the case of migration from larger to smaller cities, the residential environment beyond the metropolitan area is more important than employment opportunities. At the personal level, we analyzed the differences among the determinants of migration, looking at migrants according to age categories and based on their motivations for migrating. The main factors encouraging migration comprised opportunities for employment, education, and marriage.     

Did Japan's shopping coupon program increase spending?

In March 1999, 31 million “shopping coupons” worth 20,000 yen each were distributed to Japanese families with children and to the elderly. The coupons expired after six months and could only be used within the recipient's local community. We use variation in the number of children across families and in the number of recipients across prefectures to measure the effect of the coupons on spending. We find that coupons had a positive effect on spending on semi-durables, but no effect on spending on nondurables or services. The marginal propensity to consume on semi-durables was 0.1–0.2 when the coupons were distributed in March. The results using regional variation provide stronger evidence that spending did not fall after the coupons had been redeemed.     

The effects of consumption externalities in an R&D-based growth model with endogenous skilled and unskilled labor supply

We examine the roles of consumption externalities in a variety-expansion growth model. By assuming that the R&D sector is more skilled labor intensive than the consumption goods sector, we extend the model of Doi and Mino (J Econ Dyn Control 32:3055?C3083, 2008) so that both the skilled and unskilled labor supplies are endogenously determined through the skill acquisition process. We show that some results of Doi and Mino are influenced by our modification. For example, in contrast to Doi and Mino who show that the R&D subsidy can have a negative growth effect in the presence of consumption externalities, we show that the R&D subsidy has unambiguously positive growth effects, regardless of the presence of consumption externalities. Further, it is shown that the presence of consumption externalities influences various aspects of the economy including the wage inequality and the incentive of skill acquisition.     

A Model Forecasting Risk for Emerging Market Currencies

In this paper, we propose a risk forecasting model for emerging market currencies. Our model is based on the Markov regime switch which is constructed by exploiting daily equity market information, and we show that our model outperforms the existing model using macroeconomic information. We evaluate it by the performance measures, the goodness-of-fit and the Wilcoxon rank-sum test.     

Nonstationarity of Real Exchange Rates in the G7 Countries: Are They Cointegrated with Real Variables?

Using monthly data for the G7 countries in the post-Bretton Woods floating rate period, this paper demonstrates that almost all bilateral real exchange rates have unit roots and, hence, are nonstationary. Consequently, it rejects simple PPP as a long-run relationship. The paper also shows that many of these real exchange rates are cointegrated with other real economic variables such as relative labor productivity, terms-of-trade ratios, real trade balance ratios, and long-term real interest rate differentials. In particular, relative labor productivity is statistically significant with the correct sign for more than half of the country pairs for which cointegration is confirmed. This finding lends support to the Balassa–Samuelson productivity-bias hypothesis. These results imply that nonstationarity of real exchange rates and the consequent rejection of simple PPP can be consistent with the notion that real exchange rates revert to an equilibrium in the long run without deviating arbitrarily far from this equilibrium position.J. Japan. Int. Econ.,December 1997, pp. 523–547. Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113, Japan, and Faculty of Business and Commerce, Meiji University, 1-1 Kanda, Surugadai, Chiyada-ku, Tokyo 101, Japan.