Importance of blanket testing in promoting US beef for Japanese consumers

We carried out and analysed a questionnaire survey on consumer attitudes to verify the effectiveness of blanket testing of US beef in Japan. Applying an ordered probit model to the data yielded the following findings: blanket testing dramatically increases purchase probabilities, so it is one of the most important tools for reviving Japanese consumers’ meat demand. The effect of blanket testing is especially large in the region where the consumers traditionally ate more beef (the Kansai area). Purchase probability is lower in households with awareness of country‐of‐origin of beef before the BSE crisis than households without it. Purchase probability of the households that had eaten US beef before the BSE outbreak is higher than those that had not. Purchase probability is not affected by family structure.     

Self-managing selling teams and team performance: The complementary roles of empowerment and control

This work is the first to examine systematically the influence of empowerment and control on the degree to which selling teams engage in desired self-managing behaviors. Further, this work is the first to propose the construct of desired self-managing behaviors in a selling team context, and empirically examine its influence on selling team performance. Our investigation indicates that control of team self-management provides a complementary positive influence to that of empowerment on the degree to which selling teams exhibit desired self-managing behaviors. In addition, we find a positive relationship between the degree to which teams exhibit desired self-managing behaviors and selling team performance; moreover, this relationship explains, to a large degree, selling team performance. These findings are consistent with our thesis that control of teamwork facilitates performance on the selling team level, just as control of selling skills facilitates performance on the individual sales rep level.     

Endogenous party structure

This paper proposes a model of two-party representative democracy on a single-dimensional political space, in which voters choose their parties in order to influence the parties’ choices of representative. After two candidates are selected as the median of each party’s support group, Nature determines the candidates’ relative likability (valence). Based on the candidates’ political positions and relative likability, voters vote for the preferable candidate without being tied to their party’s choice. We show that (1) there exists a nontrivial equilibrium under natural conditions, and (2) the equilibrium party border and the ex ante probabilities of the two-party candidates winning are sensitive to the distribution of voters. In particular, we show that if a party has a more concentrated subgroup, then the party tends to alienate its centrally located voters, and the party’s probability of winning the final election is reduced. Even if voter distribution is symmetric, an extremist party (from either side) can emerge as voters become more politically divided.     

Transshipments and inventories in the Takayama-Judge model

This paper shows that the Takayama-Judge model to solve interregional and intertemporal market equilibrium conditions faces difficulties when transshipments take place and that the difficulties relating to inventories, pointed out by Guise and others in this Journal, are special cases relating to transshipments. These difficulties can be overcome, simply by relaxing the non-negativity condition imposed on x_ii(t) terms in the material balance conditions.     

Do education vouchers prevent dropout at private high schools? Evidence from Japanese policy changes

Although education voucher programs for students attending private high schools have existed in Japan for decades, to date there have been no studies that examine their effectiveness. In this study, we estimate the programs’ preventative effect on dropout by using school-track level (academic or vocational) panel data covering all high schools in northern Japan. Prefectural governments have faced increasing dropout rates stemming from financial difficulties, and expanded the scope and amount of their private high school tuition support programs since the late 1990s. We use this variation to identify the effect of tuition support on students’ dropout decisions, controlling for initial academic ability of students entering the schools and unobservable school-track effects. We also apply the instrumental variable method to account for the possible endogeneity of policy changes. Our results suggest that increasing tuition support is particularly effective in preventing the dropout of private high school students on nonacademic tracks.     

Exchange Rate Instability: Japan''''s Micro-Macro Experiences and Implications for China

I. Introduction Japan’s failure to adjust the undervalued yen in the late 1960s and early 1970s invited a highly unstable yen-dollar exchange rate. The result was the weakening of Japan’s industrial base and decade-long structural stagnation. Japanese industries had to struggle for survival. Based on my experience as financial officer of Itochu Corporation, this paper is organized as follows: Section II explains why and how the yen kept appreciating. Section III studies the responses of…     

日本企业应对日元升值的策略

1985年之后,日元汇率剧烈波动,升值到远离实体经济的水平。日本企业利用外汇远期、价格转嫁、降低成本等传统方法已无法对付升值的影响,便纷纷将生产转向海外。此后,虽然众多企业通过采用全球化最佳生产战略来平衡进出口,构筑了不受汇率变动影响的经营体制,但是对于整个日本经济而言,这意味着连那些可以在日本本土生产的产品都被迫转移到海外。由此而来的产业结构升级虽然会提供一定的就业机会,但不足以补偿生产海外转移所导致的损失。中国政府想要通过人民币对美元汇率的调整来实现“软着陆”是一件不容易的事。有效选择是建立以“货币篮子…     

Asymptotics of the probability of minimizing ‘down-side’ risk under partial information

We consider minimizing the probability of falling below a target growth rate of the wealth process up to a time horizon T in an incomplete market model under partial information and then study the asymptotic behavior of the minimizing probability as T → ∞. This problem is closely related to an ergodic risk-sensitive stochastic control problem under partial information in the risk-averse case. Indeed, in our main theorem we relate the former problem to the latter as its dual. As a result we obtain an explicit expression for the limit value of the former problem in the case of linear Gaussian models.