Why do first-born children live together with parents?

In this paper, we analyze the strategic residential location choices of multiple siblings who receive childcare assistance from their parents. Our three stage game yields a theoretical result that first-born children are more likely to live together with or close to their parents than second-born children, which is supported by our estimation results using Japanese micro-data. We also empirically show that the childcare assistance from parents is one of the determinants of the residential location choice of siblings. This paper is the first to succeed in explaining the residential location choice of siblings in Japan using economic incentives.     

Corporate Tax Reductions,Cross‐Border Ownership and Welfare

In this paper, a three‐country model incorporating the cross‐border ownership of stock and international firm relocation is constructed. Using this model, the effects of a reduction in the corporate tax on welfare in all three countries is examined. The findings indicate that if the country undertaking the reduction is moderately rich, and one of the two remaining countries is rich while the other country is poor, the tax reduction not only brings about a positive effect on its own welfare, but also increases the welfare of the rich foreign country and lowers that of the poor foreign country.     

Comments’ Extraction by User ID,Keywords, and Anchor Texts from the Thread of a Bulletin Board System

Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) on the Web are used by many users posting comments on threads. Each thread carries a subject of discussion. Most users post comments related to a subject. However, unrelated comments are also posted. The unrelated comments distract users and diminish their understanding of the entire story of a thread. Comments unrelated to a subject have to be filtered automatically. This paper proposes a method that extracts comments related to a thread subject from a thread of BBS. The method extracts two types of comments: comments related to a thread subject (main comments), and comments related to main comments (sub-comments). The main comments are extracted by a user ID and keywords in the comments. The sub-comments are extracted by explicit and implicit anchor texts in the comments. We experimented with the proposed method and verified that comments extracted by the proposed method support participants in understanding the entire story of a thread.     

ARE TELEVISION AND VIDEO GAMES REALLY HARMFUL FOR KIDS?

Are watching television (TV) and playing video games really harmful for children's development? By using a unique longitudinal dataset with detailed information on children's development and health, we examined the causal effect of hours of TV watched or of video games played on school‐aged children's problem behavior, orientation to school, and obesity. The results suggested that the answer to the question is yes, but the magnitude of the effect is sufficiently small to be considered as negligible. The results were robust to within‐twin‐fixed effects. (JEL I10, I20)     

Sales Strategy Mining Support with Visualization of Moving History

Strategic usage in data mining of sales data has come under increased focus as a result of the growth of data mining studies using electrical data, such as Point of Sale (POS) data. However, many of these mining systems only output results such as frequently appearing patterns, while, instead, they should be aimed at people who mine data. In this paper, a framework for leading and supporting new ideas from data is introduced. Based on this framework, a system that supports strategic usage in the data mining of sales data is proposed. The system deals not only with POS data, but also with the moving history of each customer. The system visualizes POS and moving history data, so that an analyzer inputs conditions to narrow down customers and acquires customer features. In addition to the ordinal outputs of a mining system, the analyzer interprets the meaning of his/her input and output to create a new strategy based on the framework. According to the experimental results, new strategies derived from the moving history were created.     

Information sharing,neighborhood demarcation,and yardstick competition: an empirical analysis of intergovernmental expenditure interaction in Japan

The Japanese government provides information on local fiscal performance through the Fiscal Index Tables for Similar Municipalities (FITS-M). The FITS-M categorize municipalities into groups of “similar localities” and provide them with the fiscal indices of their group members, enabling municipalities to use the tables to identify their “neighbors” (i.e., those in the same FITS-M group) and refer to their fiscal information as a “yardstick” for fiscal planning. We take advantage of this system to estimate municipal spending function. In particular, we examine whether the FITS-M help identify a defensible spatial weights matrix that properly describes municipal spending interactions. Our analysis shows that they do. In particular, geographical proximity is significant only between a pair of municipalities within a given FITS-M group, and it does not affect competition between pairs belonging to different groups even if they are located close to each other. This would suggest that the FITS-M work as intended, indicating that spending interaction among Japanese municipalities originates from yardstick competition and not from other types of fiscal competition.     

Heterogeneity of First-order Risk Aversion and the Equity Premium

I show that stockholders and non-stockholders can coexist in equilibrium even if securities markets are perfect and complete. This is due to a heterogeneous safety inclination, which is defined as heterogeneity in first-order risk aversion (Segal and Spivak, 1990). A static two-security market model is analysed by the mean–standard deviation approach, where safety inclination is described by the degree of the marginal rate of substitution between the mean and the standard deviation at a certain point. In equilibrium, aggregate shocks may be concentrated on stockholders, which may lead to a high equity premium.
JEL Classification Numbers: D81, E44.     

Habit persistence and stagnation

Using a money-in-the-utility function model that incorporates habit formation in consumption, we consider the question of how allowing for habit formation affects the possibility of a persistent shortage of consumption. We then contrast the model without habits with a model with habits. The main findings of our analysis are that i) when the degree of habit formation is important, a high degree of habit persistence opens up the possibility of a shortage of consumption, and ii) in the steady state with stagnation, the equilibrium consumption in the model with habit formation is smaller than the corresponding consumption without habits.     

Do environmental,social, and governance activities improve corporate financial performance?

This study investigated the relationship between corporate efficiency and corporate sustainability to determine whether firms concerned about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues can also be efficient and profitable. We applied data envelopment analysis to estimate corporate efficiency and investigated the nonlinear relationship between corporate efficiency and ESG disclosure. Evidence shows that corporate transparency regarding ESG information has a positive association with corporate efficiency at the moderate disclosure level, rather than at the high or low disclosure level. Governance information disclosure has the strongest positive linkage with corporate efficiency, followed by social and environmental information disclosure. Moreover, we explored the relationship between particular ESG activities and corporate financial performance (CFP), including corporate efficiency, return on assets, and market value. We found that most of the ESG activities reveal a nonnegative relationship with CFP. These findings may provide evidence about voluntary corporate social responsibility strategy choices for enhancing corporate sustainability.