A topological approach to Wilson’s impossibility theorem

We will present a topological approach to Wilson’s impossibility theorem [Wilson, R.B., 1972. Social choice theory without the Pareto principle. Journal of Economic Theory 5, 478–486] that there exists no non-null binary social choice rule which satisfies transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, non-imposition and has no dictator nor inverse dictator. Our research is in line with the studies of topological approaches to discrete social choice problems initiated by [Baryshnikov, Y., 1993. Unifying impossibility theorems: a topological approach. Advances in Applied Mathematics 14, 404–415]. This paper extends the result about the Arrow impossibility theorem shown in [Tanaka, Y., 2006. A topological approach to the Arrow impossibility theorem when individual preferences are weak orders. Applied Mathematics and Computation 174, 961–981] to Wilson’s theorem.     

Optimal Taxation of Elderly Care Services

This paper explores optimal taxation of market purchases of an elderly care service, which can also be produced in the home. Home production cannot be taxed. If children discount parents' utility relative to their own utilities, an intergenerational externality arises in the family. When home production of the service is significant, the optimal tax rate on market purchases should be: (i) high , if the service and leisure are complements and the externality is strong, (ii) low , if they are substitutes , irrespective of the degree of the externality.     

Does the diversity of human capital increase GDP? A comparison of education systems

This paper examines how different education systems affect GDP by influencing the diversity of human capital. We construct an overlapping generation model in which agents are heterogeneous in income and innate ability, and the final goods are produced with differentiated intermediate goods. It is shown that under a realistic condition, the diversity of human capital induced by income inequality always lowers the GDP of the next period, while the diversity of human capital induced by heterogeneous ability can increase GDP, if the produced intermediate goods are sufficiently substitutable and firms have a large span of control. Hence, as public education equalizes education resources across households, it mitigates the negative effect of income inequality on GDP, while the effects of ability tracking crucially depend on the production structure of the economy.     

Food Processing Business and Agriculture Cooperatives in Japan: Market Power and Asymmetric Information*

Food processing businesses run by agriculture cooperatives (in this paper referred to as food processing cooperatives) are basically firms that are owned by the suppliers of raw materials. Typically, in this type of firm, corporate decision‐making is the responsibility of member farmers through the one member one–vote rule, and the surplus of the business is divided among them according to the amount of raw agricultural products they have supplied to the firm. This is in contrast to a conventional capitalistic firm, in which corporate decision‐making is ultimately made by the stockholders through the one share–one vote rule, and the profit is divided among them according to the amount of financial capital they have supplied to the firm. Based upon statistical data and case studies, the present paper considers some economic factors that might influence the establishment of food processing cooperatives.     

THE GROWTH AFTERMATH OF NATURAL DISASTERS

This paper traces the yearly response of gross domestic product growth—both aggregated and disaggregated into its agricultural and non‐agricultural components—to four types of natural disasters: droughts, floods, earthquakes, and storms. The paper uses a methodological approach based on pooling the experiences of various countries over time. It consists of vector autoregressions in the presence of endogenous variables and exogenous shocks (VARX), applied to a panel of cross‐country and time series data. The analysis finds heterogeneous effects on a variety of dimensions. First, the effects of natural disasters are stronger on developing than on advanced countries. Second, not all natural disasters are alike in terms of the growth response they induce, and some can even have positive effects on economic growth. Third, severe disasters often carry much worse effects than moderate effects do. Fourth, the timing of the growth response varies with both the type of natural disaster and the sector of economic activity. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recovery Process Model

Recently, because of Basel II and the subprime mortgage crisis, the quantification of the recovery size and the recovery rate for the debt of a defaulted company is a serious problem for financial institutions and their supervisors, but there has been no study of structure of the recovery process which is the relationship between time and the cumulative recovery size. Existent recovery models do not regard the recovery progress before the time of achievement of recovery. We directly model recovery process for the debt of a single defaulted company. We model the recovery process by a homogeneous compound Poisson process and extend our model to an inhomogeneous compound Poisson process. The interest rate is explicitly used in our model. By our model, the relationship between the cumulative recovery, the increment of recovery, the initial debt amount, the last recovery possible time and the interest rate can be analyzed. We derive the expected value and the variance of the survival value of the debt and the recovery rate, and also derive the probability distribution function and the expected value of the recovery completion time. Moreover we present the numerical methods for calculating the expected value and the variance based on Panjer recursion formula and the fast Fourier transformation, and show numerical results. Also we propose a new method of calculating the transition density of an inhomogeneous compound Poisson process. Our method is based on approximating an inhomogeneous compound Poisson process by a piecewise homogeneous compound Poisson process. This method is used to compute the expected value and the variance of an inhomogeneous compound Poisson process.     

Globalization of Information Services and the Industrial Structure of the Japanese Economy

Since the late 1990s, ICT has rebuilt organizational networks by connecting value chains and providing communication networks. This made certain types of services tradable, including information services. This change raised the public concern in terms of the effect on employment and innovation capacity in developed economies. The fragmentation of the production network of information services has been led by US firms, but is spreading to East Asia, typically in outsourcing from Japan to China, India and the ASEAN countries. This study empirically assesses the effect of offshore outsourcing on employment in Japan, specifying trading partners. The results show that information services outsourcing affects employment in the manufacturing sector in Japan, but the effect is different depending on trading partners. This study discusses the implications from the viewpoint of industry policy, relating the results to outsourced business processes.