Married Women’s Lifestyles in Japan: Disparities Based on the Number of Children

In order to explore the complex mechanisms of married women’s decisions in matters of childbirth, we studied empirically the relations between family size and aspects of lifestyle through a questionnaire survey administered in 2006 to married women living in the city of Suita, Japan, a suburb of Osaka. Lifestyle was taken as a complex of mutual relationships among individual (biographical, psychological) and social (socioeconomic, social support) factors, and our aim was to clarify differences in Japan in lifestyle among married women based on the number of their children. Analysis of 495 respondents showed mothers with only a single child were more self-reliant: they tend to give birth at a late age, enjoy cooperation with their husbands in family finances, be psychologically at ease, and not seek help from others in child rearing. Mothers with three or more children embody more of the traditional role for Japanese women: they tend to give birth at an early age, be reliant on their husbands financially, be less at ease psychologically, and seek others’ help in child rearing. These differences suggest that more focus on psychological, not just economic support in government policy to counteract declining fertility is an important issue for future consideration.     

Did Social Security Improve Labor Productivity?

This note statistically investigates the relationship between social security expenditure indexes and labor productivity during 1980- 2009 in Japan based on the Solow type of production function. In the case of real social security expenditure per labor and per total working hours, labor productivity decreases with respect to real social security. On the other hand, in the case of real social security expenditure per private capital stock, labor productivity increases with respect to real social security. However, the partial regression coefficients of these three indexes are not significant statistically. Therefore, we could not derive a clear relationship between the social security indexes and labor productivity.     

A Microsimulation Model for Projections of Japanese Socioeconomic Structure

The Integrated Analytical Model for Household Simulation (INAHSIM) is a microsimulation model for the Japanese population that was first developed in the 1980s as a tool for household simulation. This study attempted to improve the conventional INAHSIM in order to construct a more comprehensive alternative that incorporates a larger number of social and economic elements. It also overcame the problem for simulation—the lack of kinship relations in the initial population—by imputing parent-child relationships between those parents and children who do not live together. This paper provides an overview of INAHSIM and adds certain details of the imputation that is essential for simulating the life event of “adult children resettling to care for their aged parents.” In addition, I will show the importance of the said life event in Japan by comparing the difference in the family type of elderly people between its future distribution with or without this life event. Finally, I will discuss the future possibilities for research on microsimulation models that will play an important role in policy making.     

The Effects of Proposals for Basic Pension Reform on the Income Distribution of the Elderly in Japan

The aging of the population in Japan is a serious problem, and the reform of the public pension scheme is a major political issue. Although the 2004 pension reform was enforced to ensure a sustainable pension system in such an aging society, people remain quite apprehensive about the pension system. Consequently, various sectors have created new proposals for pension reform to overcome these problems, and it has become a recent policy debate. The objective of this article is to prepare projections for the income distribution of households containing elderly people using the Japanese microsimulation model, INAHSIM (Integrated Analytical Model for Household Simulation), and to evaluate the effect of the proposals on the living standards of the elderly. According to the simulation results, the problem of very low pension amounts for the elderly does not appear to be growing. However, changes in co-resident families of the elderly, such as the increase in the number of people living alone, may cause a decline in their standard of living. The author points out the problems of the previously proposed reform plans and proposes an alternative reform plan based on the perspective used in this paper.     

Contributions of Econometrics to Public Policy Analysis in the Information Age

In this paper we model U.S. economic growth over the next 25 years. Despite the anticipated aging of the population, moderate population growth will provide growing supplies of labor well into the 21st century. Improvements in labor quality due to education and experience will also continue for some time, but will eventually disappear. Productivity growth for the U.S. economy will be below long-term historical averages, but labor-using technical change will be a stimulus for growth of labor demand. Year-to-year changes in economic activity will be primarily the consequence of capital accumulation. However, the driving forces of economic growth over the long term will be demography and technology. This is a revised version of the keynote speech that I delivered on 16 January 2009 at the 6th International Conference of Socionetwork Strategies, at Kansai University, Japan.     

Research Note: Analysis of the Characteristics of Victims in Information Security Incident Damages: The Case of Japanese Internet Users

In this article, the authors investigate the attributes of victims in information security incident damages for the purpose of reducing the damages. The Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan, in 2010, conducted an Internet survey targeted to Japanese Internet home users entitled, “Survey of awareness toward information security incidents” that is used in this article. Using micro data collected from this survey, they employed multinomial logit regression analysis to show factors affecting the user’s experience of the incidents of damage through particular incidents. They concluded that the overconfidence regarding information security knowledge increased the probability for phishing and spoofing.     

A Statistical Analysis Between Consumer Behavior and a Social Network Service: A Case Study of Used-Car Demand Following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011

When a large-scale disaster hits a community, especially a water-related disaster, there is a scarcity of automobiles and a sudden increase in the demand for used cars in the damaged areas. This paper conducts a case study of a recent massive natural disaster, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 to understand those car scarcities and demand in the aftermath of the catastrophe. We analyze the reasons for the increase in demand for used cars and how social media can predict people’s demand for used automobiles. In other words, this paper explores whether social media data can be used as a sensor of socio-economic recovery status in damaged areas during large-scale water-related disaster-recovery phases. For this purpose, we use social media communication as a proxy for estimating indicators of people’s activities in the real world. This study conducts both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. For the qualitative research, we carry out semi-structured interviews with used-car dealers in the tsunami-stricken area and unveil why people in the area demanded used cars. For the quantitative analysis, we collected Facebook page communication data and used-car market data before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011. By combining and analyzing these two types of data, we find that social media communication correlates with people’s activities in the real world. Furthermore, this study suggests that different types of communication on social media have different types of correlations with people’s activities. More precisely, we find that social media communication related to people’s activities for rebuilding and for emotional support is positively correlated with the demand for used cars after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. On the other hand, communication about anxiety and information seeking correlates negatively with the demand for used cars.     

史清琪：从经济学家到女企协副会长

“我曾想：我是妇女吗？在国家发改委主要是男人的世界里,我经常不想自己是女性,也缺乏性别意识”     

Spam mails impede economic growth

We estimate labor losses caused by spam mails and input these estimated values into a production function, while also estimating damage to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Japan. As a result, we have found that spam mails decreased the Japanese GDP by about 500 billion yen in 2004. This marginal negative effect of spam mail to the GDP increased with the progress of broadband in 2000. Moreover, from the result of a social simulation conducted by the authors, the amount of damage is projected to reach 1% of the Japanese GDP by 2010, unless adequate countermeasures are taken against spam mails. This projection provides a statistical fundamental to several theoretical analyses of spam mails.     

The Effect of Information Communication Technology and Corporate Organizational Reforms on Productivity in Japan: Firm- level Evidence

Our main objective in this paper is to understand how Japanese firms can increase productivity by utilizing Information and Communication Technology (ICT). E-commerce, BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), and SCM (Supply Chain Management) are popular in Japan, so a new type of ICT might offer an opportunity for Japanese firms to change current business relations or to start up new ones. The novelty of this paper is in its empirical study of the combination of ICT promotion and a variety of business organizational changes needed to discover which type of business organizational change is suitable for raising productivity in Japan. For workplace organization within firms, we discuss the decentralization or centralization of decision-making power and the flattening of the corporate hierarchy. For business relational changes, we discuss the outsourcing of the business process and the start up of new business relations. Our main result is that in general, the promotion of ICT has better effects in reforms related to changes in business relations among business partners, rather than to reforms within a firm. Starting up new business relations that require planning and R&D show the best chances of raising productivity using ICT promotion.     

Graph-Based Entropy for Detecting Explanatory Signs of Changes in Market

Graph-based entropy, an index of the diversity of events in their distribution to parts of a co-occurrence graph, is proposed for detecting signs of structural changes in the data that are informative in explaining latent dynamics of consumers’ behavior. For obtaining graph-based entropy, connected sub-graphs are first obtained from the graph of co-occurrences of items in the data. Then, the distribution of items occurring in events in the data to these sub-graphs is reflected on the value of graph-based entropy. For the data on the position of sale, a change in this value is regarded as a sign of the appearance, the separation, the disappearance, or the uniting of consumers’ interests. These phenomena are regarded as the signs of dynamic changes in consumers’ behavior that may be the effects of external events and information. Experiments show that graph-based entropy outperforms baseline methods that can be used for change detection, in explaining substantial changes and their signs in consumers’ preference of items in supermarket stores.     

An Exploratory Look at Supply Chains in Japan from Multiscale Network Perspectives

In social network analysis, advances in social networking and computing techniques have increasingly become a popular approach for extracting features and rules of real-world networks. The network language—\(G=\{V, E \}\) provides a common representation of various networks, where G, V, and E denote the system, components, and interactions, respectively. In this study, we employ this emerging technique to discuss supply chains in Japan. We construct the supply network (i.e., system) based on the firms (i.e., components) and their transactional relationships (i.e., interactions). In comparison with the traditional approaches of industrial sectors and regional clusters, this study represents an exploratory look at supply networks, and investigates different scales of supply networks from three perspectives. (1) In the macro-scale perspective, we evaluate the “small-world” separation of supply networks using average path length. (2) In the meso-scale perspective, we detect communities of the supply networks, which can be marked for cross-location and cross-industry features. (3) In the micro-scale perspective, we investigate the “scale-free” nature of supply networks and each community using node degree-prior connections, which can find “hub” firms and simultaneously estimate the robustness of supply networks using a sequential elimination choice strategy of these hubs.     

An Advertising Strategy Using Consumption Externality and Forgetting in the Case of Japanese Electronic Books

We construct a two-period model in which a consumer recognizes the existence of goods after advertised by firms, and total sales of the first period affect the utility of each consumer’s purchase in the second period, indicating a consumption externality. Some consumers see advertisements in the first period and remember the product, whereas some forget the product in the second period. We show that the advertising volume changes given the differences in the forgetting rate. In particular, we apply our method to the data on Japan’s electronic books obtained through a conjoint analysis survey to clarify that a better strategy is to sell a product to a small number of people at a low price or to lower the price to a certain level during the early period, and then to sell the product to a specific consumer segment at a higher price after reflecting the externality.     

A Conjoint Analysis of a Next Generation Network (NGN) in Japan

A conjoint analysis on a Web survey in 2010 with 160 participants and 8 questions shows that a Marginal Willingness To Pay (MWTP) on a Next Generation Network (NGN) of Flet’s Hikari Next is lower than its actual price as provided by NTT East. Conjoint analysis is one application of conditional logit. MWTP is WTP when one unit of property is increased, and MWTP is used to verify how much each person evaluates each property. Higher transmission speed, digital TV availability, and higher Internet security affect the MWTP positively, and the amount of the monthly payment of NGN affects the MWTP negatively. Therefore, it is assumed that the NGN of Flet’s Hikari Next by NTT East will be accepted by potential customers and diffused as a major communications service of NTT East and NTT West. NGN providers may be able to maximize their benefits by adjusting the NGN of Flet’s Hikari Next property to meet customer demands, especially in digital TV availability, higher transmission speed, and communications security.     

Subcontracting Structure and Productivity in the Japanese Software Industry

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors determining the productivity of the software industry in Japan, using individual data from the Survey of the State of the Information Service Industry conducted in August 2006 by IPA (Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan). This paper focuses on the relationship between the subcontracting structure and productivity in the Japanese software industry. Software enterprises are classified as prime contractors, intermediate subcontractors, end-contractors, and independent enterprise. A comparison of their productivity levels reveals that intermediate subcontractors are the least productive. However, it is observed that the intermediate subcontractors possessing a high quality of human resources measured the proportion of employees passing the Information Technology Engineers Examination (ITEE), or the intermediate subcontractors adopting the IT skill standard which defines the skills for IT human resources clearly and systematically, has a high productivity level. It can raise the productivity in software industry as a whole.     

The Future of Socionetwork Strategies

In the first stage of creating technological improvements for a democratic society, the leaders of the Society of Socionetwork Strategies have conducted statistical research on the effect of information and communication technology on the global economy. In the second stage, younger professors, based on their Positive Studies, have leapt into a multi-agent simulation of Grid Computing. In the third stage, a terra-bite scale of social data-collecting and the mining of large-scale data in our real world will be next. The next generation of scientists will share knowledge and intellectual inquiry in the fields of statistics, mathematics, and the social sciences with the help of computers connecting such scholars from all over the world.     

Technological Progress and the Wage Growth of Older Japanese Workers

Declining birth and mortality rates are leading to population aging throughout the OECD countries. This paper examines one possible consequence for national productivity – we ask: Are older workers able to take advantage of new technologies as effectively as their younger counterparts? Using Japanese data for 1973-2000, we find that if we ignore job tenure, workers beyond the age of 50 do not seem as able to benefit from total factor productivity growth as their younger colleagues. However, Japanese workers past age 50 move to lesser paying positions more frequently than is common elsewhere, and we believe that the complete answer to our question depends upon whether an inability to keep up with new technologies induces late-in-career job changes or whether the changes follow, in practice, from other factors.     

Research Note: The Paradox of Cloud Computing in Japan

Cloud Computing is defined as computer usage delivered as a service over the Internet. This cloud computing is classified as public computing, private computing, or hybrid computing. Public cloud computing is open to any customer who pays service charges. On the contrary, private cloud computing is used by a member of a company who has constructed a cloud computing system over a restricted domain on that company's information infrastructure. Hybrid cloud computing is a mix of both the public and private. Which type of cloud computing is popular in Japan? To answer this question I mailed questionnaires to 2,284 enterprises listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Market in 2012 and 2013. I analyzed the relationship between these answers and financial indexes using a multinomial logistic regression model. I concluded that the total assets was the most effective factor in the decision to introduce the public cloud, and the accumulated profit was one of the most effective factors in the decision to introduce the hybrid cloud. These findings are not consistent with orthodox price theory.     

Implementation issues in a grid-based multi-agent simulation system used for increasing labor supply

This paper describes issues of implementation for a Grid-based multi-agent simulation used to support decision-makers in making their decisions. Recently, social scientists including sociologists, economists, and social psychologists, have become interested in large- scale multi-agent simulation. However, users who are not familiar with operating large-scale computing resources may have a difficult time implementing these simulations. Therefore, the authors have developed a computing environment with a task-control support framework for a day care center allocation problem. In addition, we show how to implement the Grid-based multi-agent simulation system. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of the proposed system using experiments with human subjects. By using the proposed prototype system, decision-makers were able to find near optimal solutions without examining all possible tasks.     

Who Works at the Interface in Knowledge Spillover Across Organizational Boundaries?

To investigate the characteristics of engineers who act as an interface in transferring knowledge across national boundaries, I conducted an empirical analysis regarding the mobility of engineers in electrical manufacturing firms from Japan to South Korea. Statistical findings from negative binomial regressions show that the experience of working with foreign engineers facilitates knowledge spillover. In addition, the results show that interfirm knowledge transfer is more likely to occur when the engineers of the hiring firm work together with mobile engineers who (1) were focal members at their previous firm, (2) had a good connection with focal members, and (3) are young. This study suggests that engineers from external organizations are effective in knowledge transfer, especially if they are young, mobile engineers who were focal members at their previous firm and had a good connection with a focal member—and can act as an interface in transferring tacit knowledge.