ECONOMIC MODELLING OF SUICIDE UNDER INCOME UNCERTAINTY: FOR BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF MIDDLE‐AGED SUICIDE*

This paper formalises an individual's decision about suicide within a framework of lifetime utility maximisation models. This is in line with the literature on economic modelling of suicide. The novelty of the paper is to take into account income uncertainty. Income uncertainty reduces a risk‐averse individual's expected utility, making them more likely to commit suicide. On the other hand, income uncertainty creates a value to postponing suicide even when their income gets sufficiently low. This is because income uncertainty means that if things go well, they will get higher income in the future. Thus, income uncertainty has two opposite effects on suicidal behaviour. The main objective of this paper is to construct an economic model of suicide for investigating net impacts of income uncertainty on suicidal behaviour. For this purpose, it is assumed that the wage evolves according to a stochastic process. Then, the threshold wage, below which an individual commits suicide, is derived as a function of the parameters of the stochastic process assumed for the wage evolution. Impacts of changes in these parameters on the threshold wage are calculated. With the result, the paper shows how income uncertainty affects suicidal behaviour.     

MONOPOLISTIC COMPETITION WITH EFFICIENCY GAPS AND A HECKSCHER‐OHLIN TRADE PATTERN*

We develop a two‐factor, three‐sector model of international trade in which the monopolistically competitive firms are characterized by different fixed production costs. We show that, depending on the pattern of the international distribution of factor endowments, the trade pattern is determined not only by relative factor endowments as suggested by Heckscher and Ohlin, but also by absolute factor endowments via a mechanism of competitive selection in the monopolistically competitive sector.     

HOME MARKET EFFECT AND TRADE COSTS*

Concerning industrial location, the home market effect (HME) predicts that a large country is a net exporter of industrial goods. Recent literature shows that high transport costs in the traditional sector may obscure the HME in an early model of two sectors à la Helpman and Krugman. This paper presents an alternative model that displays the relationship between the HME and arbitrary transport costs while allowing for the derivation of analytical results by simple algebra. Our results show that the transport costs in the traditional sector do not obscure the HME but constitute a dispersion force that decreases the impact of the HME.     

SHIFT WORKING AND TRADE IN LABOUR SERVICES WITH TIME ZONE DIFFERENCES

Using a two‐factor (labour and capital), two‐good (shift‐working and non‐shift‐working commodities) model with two countries (Home and Foreign), which are located in different time zones, we highlight the impact of trade in labour services (via communications networks) on the comparative advantage of countries capable of such trade. It is shown that a comparative advantage in a shift‐working commodity is held by pairs of countries in different time zones and connected through a good communication network. Concerning factor prices, if the shift‐working commodity is capital (respectively, labour) intensive, the wage rate for day‐shift labour will decrease (respectively, increase) as a result of trade in labour services. It is also demonstrated that this labour service utilization is mutual: some of Home's day‐shift labour will be utilized for the Foreign night shift, and vice versa. Thus, periodic trade in labour services occurs across countries.     

INTERNATIONAL CREDIT CHANNEL OF MONETARY POLICY: AN EMPIRICAL NOTE

A longstanding macroeconomic issue is how monetary policy affects the real economy. There are economists placing an emphasis on the role of bank lending in monetary transmission. Their view, called the credit view, is that a monetary tightening shifts the supply schedule of bank loans left, thereby forcing bank‐dependent borrowers to cut back on expenditures. In the literature, the credit view is typically studied in a closed‐economy context. In reality, however, banks make international loans through their overseas branches and subsidiaries. This suggests that the credit view should be studied in an open‐economy context. This paper proposes the international credit view: a monetary‐policy shock originated in one country propagates to another through banks’ reallocation of funds between the two countries. For testing the hypothesis, Australia and New Zealand provide an excellent case to study. This is because Australian‐owned banks dominate the banking market in New Zealand. This paper aims to test the international credit view within a framework of vector auto‐regression models. A significant and robust finding is that the supply schedule of loans shifts left in New Zealand after a monetary tightening in Australia.     

Measles and the spatio‐temporal structure of modern Japan1

This article explores the spatio‐temporal structure of infectious diseases in modern Japan, using measles mortality data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three aspects of the epidemiology of measles are discussed: the synchronization of epidemic waves, seasonality, and age at infection. These epidemiological analyses are connected to, respectively, regional integration, governmental policy on primary school education, and the number of young children in families. In addition, based on the fact that measles did not become endemic in early modern Edo (Tokyo), this article corrects epidemiologists' misunderstanding about the threshold of endemicity and argues that the critical population size varied substantially according to the societal factors of a given community. In so doing, this article suggests that historians can use measles data as a new biometric index for studying human health and socio‐economic conditions in societies of the past.     

HOUSEHOLD USES OF TIME — TRANSITIONS FROM 1960 TO 1980

Studies of time-use in Japan were reviewed by Tanaka at the Uppsala Conference,¹ followed by a review of time-input for household work given by Matsushima at the Bulgaria Conference.² This paper will study the changes of household work with data based on past national 5-year interval surveys, the NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) Japan Broadcasting Corporation surveys of 1960, 1965, 1970, (1973 interim), 1975 and 1980. The latest 1980 survey has been summarized by Nakanishi.³     

Aging,Savings, and Public Pensions in Japan*

We analyze the impact of population aging on Japan's household savings rate and on its public pension system and the impact of that system on Japan's household savings rate and obtain the following results: first, the age structure of Japan's population can explain the level of, and past and future trends in, its household savings rate; second, the rapid aging of Japan's population is causing Japan's household savings rate to decline and this decline can be expected to continue; third, the pay‐as‐you‐go nature of the public pension system, combined with rapid population aging, created considerable intergenerational inequities and increased the savings rates of cohorts born after 1965, which in turn slowed the decline in Japan's household savings rate; and fourth, the 2004 public pension reform alleviated the intergenerational inequities of Japan's public pension system somewhat but will in the long run exacerbate the downward trend in Japan's household savings rate.     

Strategic Transparency and Electoral Pressure

This paper investigates how an office‐motivated incumbent can use transparency enhancement on public spending to signal his budgetary management ability and win re‐election. We show that, when the incumbent faces a popular challenger, transparency policy can be an effective signaling device. It is also shown that electoral pressure can have a nonmonotonic effect on transparency, but a higher electoral pressure always increases the informativeness of signaling and the voter's utility.