Political Representation and Legislative Bargaining over Redistribution

International Advances in Economic Research - The theories of dynamic legislative bargaining have supposed that the distribution of legislators are constant across periods. In reality, a transition...     

Growth and inequality in the great and little divergence debate: a Japanese perspective

This article addresses the question of growth and inequality in the great and little divergence trajectories on both sides of Eurasia. A social table constructed for Tokugawa Japan in the 1840s is compared with two cases with high levels of inequality, Stuart England and Mughal India, and the subsequent changes in the three countries are traced to the modern era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Japanese pattern in the early modern period can be characterized by comparatively modest growth with a relatively egalitarian distribution of income between the social classes, but the pattern changed during the subsequent half‐century to one with an increased tempo of growth and a substantial rise in the level of income inequality. The implications of this finding are discussed in terms of the concept of Smithian growth and are placed in the comparative context of the divergence debate.     

Effects of international sharing of pollution abatement burdens on income inequality among countries

Improvements in environmental quality will boost output production and hence economic growth. However, although environmental abatement equally benefits all economies in the world, it is shown that, if the private productive resources are not yet accumulated sufficiently in low income economies, income inequality among economies can be widened in the short term not only under equal burden sharing of pollution abatement but even under income-proportional burden sharing. When the marginal productivity is diminishing, the negative effect of the burden is large relative to the positive effect of the improved environment in economies in which resources are not accumulated sufficiently.     

On the consumption insurance effects of long-term care insurance in Japan: Evidence from micro-level household data

Using micro-level household data in the 2001 Comprehensive Survey of the Living Conditions of the People on Health and Welfare compiled by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, this paper examines how having a household member in need of long-term nursing care can result in welfare losses measured in terms of consumption. In so doing, this study evaluates the role of the public long-term care insurance scheme implemented in Japan in April 2000. The results indicate that when households include a disabled family member, household consumption net of long-term care costs do not decrease as much as before the introduction of long-term care insurance. Further, when compared with the surveys conducted in 1998, the adverse effects on consumption net of long-term care costs have become much weaker. These findings suggest that the introduction of social insurance in 2000 helped Japanese households to reduce the welfare losses associated with a disabled family member.     

The Effect of Risk Characteristics on the Willingness to Pay for Mortality Risk Reductions from Electric Power Generation

The objective of this study is to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for the reduction of mortality risks caused by fossil fuel (natural gas, coal and oil) versus nuclear electric power generation systems and to examine the influence of risk characteristics involved with electric power generation on WTP. A choice experiment was conducted to achieve these objectives. The attributes for nuclear risks in the experiment included the probability of disasters and the expected losses if a disaster occurs. We find evidence of (i) a baseline effect (where WTP is sensitive to hypothetical versus actual baseline expected mortality); (ii) a ‘labeling effect,’ where, surprisingly, the term ‘nuclear’ has no effect on WTP, but the term ‘fossil-fueled power generation’ results in lower WTP; and (iii) disaster aversion, meaning that people focus on the conditional loss from a nuclear disaster, not the probability. We also find that the WTP for reducing deaths from a nuclear disaster is about 60 times the WTP for routine reducing fossil-fuel generation-related deaths.     

Pricing Foreign Exchange Options Under Intervention by Absorption Modeling

We consider option pricing for a foreign exchange (FX) rate where interventions by an authority may take place when the rate approaches to a certain level at the down side. We formulate the forward FX model by a diffusion process which is stopped by a hitting time of an absorption boundary. Moreover, for a deterministic volatility case with a moving absorption whose level is described by an ordinary differential equation, we obtain closed-form formulas for prices of a European put option and a digital option, and Greeks of the put option. Furthermore, we show an extension of the pricing formula to the case where the intervention level is unknown. In numerical examples, we show option prices for different strikes for the absorption model and the extended model. We compare the model prices with the market prices for EURCHF options traded before January 2015 with the absorption model, and also show experiments of the extended model as an application to the pricing under uncertain views on the intervention.     

The labor market in Tokugawa Japan: Wage differentials and the real wage level, 1727–1830

Tokugawa economic history provides quite an interesting example of the workings of the labor market: In the Tokugawa period a contraction in occupational wage differentials occurred concurrently with a rise in real wages. This paper deals with these aspects of wage change and a general set of problems which has arisen about them. The first section sets out these problems; the second deals with the evidence on wage differentials and real wages in Kinai from 1727 to 1830. The third provides a theoretical framework to explain the findings; finally the last section examines the implications of the findings.     

Sequential product positioning in the presence of an asymmetric network externality intensity

In this study, we analyze the sequential decisions on product positioning of two firms in the presence of network externalities. One commonly accepted phenomena in a market where a network externality arises is the first‐mover advantage, in which the first entrant into a market can earn a higher profit than later entrants. However, in some recent online services markets, we see that the second mover earns a higher profit than the first mover. This occurs because the second mover strengthens its variety of available functions and services markedly, thereby facilitating consumers' work and communication with its main product, which we call network externality intensity. Based on this observation, we analyze sequential positioning in Hotelling's framework by incorporating an asymmetric network externality intensity between firms. We show that unlike the results of previous related studies, both first‐ and second‐mover advantages can appear in the equilibrium depending on the relationship of the network externality intensity between firms; further, they do not change monotonically with the level of network externality intensity.