Disability insurance and environmental tax policy in a zero net emissions society

This study aims to show the importance of disability insurance from an environmental policy perspective. Within the framework of an overlapping generations model, we derive the emissions tax rate required to achieve zero net pollution. Our model implies that the emissions tax rate is always lower in the presence of disability insurance than it is in the absence of disability insurance. The results suggest that disability insurance can be used as an instrument for increasing gross domestic product performance when the government implements a zero net emissions policy.     

International Trade and Income Inequality*

We propose a simple theory that shows a mechanism through which international trade entails wage and job polarization. We consider two countries in which individuals with different abilities work either as knowledge workers, who develop differentiated products, or as production workers, who engage in production. In equilibrium, ex ante symmetric firms attract knowledge workers with different abilities, and this creates firm heterogeneity in product quality. Market integration disproportionately benefits firms that produce high-quality products. This winner-take-all trend of product markets causes a war for talents, which exacerbates income inequality within the countries and leads to labor-market polarization.     

Referrals in search markets

This paper compares the equilibrium outcomes in search markets with and without referrals. Although it seems clear that consumers would benefit from referrals, it is not at all clear whether firms would unilaterally provide information about competing offers since such information could encourage consumers to purchase the product elsewhere. In a model of a horizontally differentiated product market with sequential consumer search, we show that valuable referrals can arise in the equilibrium: a firm will give referrals to consumers whose ideal product is sufficiently far away from the firm's offering. We allow firms to price-discriminate among consumers, and consumers to misrepresent their tastes. We found that the equilibrium profits tend to be higher in markets with referrals than in markets without. Consumers tend to be better off in the presence of referrals when search costs are not too low, and under a certain parameter range, referrals lead to a Pareto improvement.     

老龄化与日本的社会保障

日本今年3月发生的大地震和核发电站的泄露事故,给政府和国民敲响警钟,震灾后的复兴,同时也是日本社会保障、社会福利的复兴。本文就日本的老龄化、社会保障、社会福利服务的现状进行分析,同时提出了社会保障构造改革后社会保障政策的诸多问题,并就日本社会保障未来的发展方向提出了思考和建议。     

Environmental risk and welfare valuation under imperfect information

Consumers are often uninformed, or unsure, about the ambient level of environmental risk. An optimal policy must jointly determine efficient levels of self-protection, information provision, and public risk mitigation efforts. Unfortunately, conventional welfare measures are not amenable to welfare analysis in the presence of imperfect information. We develop a theoretical welfare measure, called quasi-compensating variation, that is a natural extension of compensating variation (CV). We show that this welfare measure offers not only a money metric of the “value of information,” but also a means to appropriately evaluate the welfare effects of various policies when consumers are imperfectly informed about ambient risk. This welfare measure allows us to obtain a number of results that the traditional CV measure fails to offer. In particular, we show that the consumer’s willingness to pay for a (small) environmental risk reduction is higher for those who underestimate ambient risk than for those who overestimate or are perfectly informed if the marginal return to self-protection increases with ambient risk.     

A framework for estimating willingness-to-pay to avoid endogenous environmental risks

This paper proposes a general empirical strategy to estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) for exogenous risk mitigation when environmental risks are endogenous in protective actions and consumers are imperfectly informed about the ambient risk levels. The strategy consists of a set of survey techniques and the dummy endogenous variable model (Heckman, 1978) to control for correlation in unobserved errors that enter the WTP equation and the protection-decision equation. The method is applied to the non-market valuation survey data on arsenic contamination in drinking water. Our results indicate that the estimated WTPs are significantly higher for households without self-protective action. Our approach thus offers not only the correct welfare estimate for exogenous reduction of environmental risks, but also yields policy implications qualitatively much different from the conventional approach. We also estimate the welfare value of the policy to inform and educate the public about the arsenic risk simultaneously with public risk mitigation. The estimated welfare value is similar to, though slightly higher than, that of risk mitigation without information component. This occurs due to the competing effects of information dissemination and risk mitigation efforts.     

Analysts’ Perceptions of Intellectual Capital Information

This study is based on a survey of 324 financial analysts in Japan. The survey concerns analysts’ perceptions of intellectual capital (IC) information and its links to the evaluation of companies. The value relevance of and the access to IC‐related information reveals a large gap on many items. The analysis further shows that the lack of access to information hampers analysts’ use of IC in their evaluation of companies, particularly in their use of human capital measures. Attitudes towards more disclosure and standardisation are mainly driven by perceptions of what generates value in companies.     

Credible group stability in many-to-many matching problems

It is known that in two-sided many-to-many matching problems, pairwise-stable matchings may not be immune to group deviations, unlike in many-to-one matching problems (Blair, 1988). In this paper, we show that pairwise stability is equivalent to credible group stability when one side has responsive preferences and the other side has categorywise-responsive preferences. A credibly group-stable matching is immune to any “executable” group deviations with an appropriate definition of executability. Under the same preference restriction, we also show the equivalence between the set of pairwise-stable matchings and the set of matchings generated by coalition-proof Nash equilibria of an appropriately defined strategic-form game.     

Evaluation of a Multi-robot Cafe Based on Service Quality Dimensions

While AI applications are popular in many domains, they should work harmoniously with domain exerts and end users. Furthermore, to develop such harmonious AI applications, we need agile AI platforms for not only developers, but also domain experts. Currently, we have developed PRactical INTElligent aPplicationS (PRINTEPS), which is a user-centric platform to develop integrated intelligent applications. This paper reports on a multi-robot cafe as a practical application of PRINTEPS and evaluates its service quality at a university festival. It is not clear if robotic services are perceived as attractive and/or valuable, and how the concept of robotic services could lead to customer satisfaction. Therefore, the evaluation of the quality of such services is necessary to identify the key factors that could contribute to improving customer satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to identify key factors in improving customer satisfaction in robotic services by evaluating the service quality of the multi-robot cafe. We designed questionnaire items based on SERVQUAL which is one of the service quality evaluation measurement methods and conducted a questionnaire survey at a multi-robot cafe held at a university festival. From the collected data, we modeled and evaluated the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction to identify key factors in robotic services using a Bayesian network. In addition, the experiment confirms the usefulness of PRINTEPS.