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.     

Income and Employment Generation from Agricultural Processing and Marketing: The Case of Soybean in Indonesia

This study aims to illustrate the potential of agricultural processing and marketing activities in generating local income and employment in developing economies, using soybean in Indonesia as a case. The results show that those activities add to rural income and employment at a scale equal or even larger than those generated from farm production itself, indicating their role in alleviating poverty and inequality in the rural sector.     

A three state model of worker flows in general equilibrium

We develop a simple model featuring search frictions and a nondegenerate labor supply decision along the extensive margin. The model is a standard version of the neoclassical growth model with indivisible labor and idiosyncratic productivity shocks and frictions characterized by employment loss and employment opportunity arrival shocks. We argue that it is able to account for the key features of observed labor market flows for reasonable parameter values. Persistent idiosyncratic productivity shocks play a key role in allowing the model to match the persistence of the employment and out of the labor force states found in individual labor market histories.     

Repeated moral hazard with persistence

Summary. This paper considers the optimal contract when the current (hidden) action of an agent has a persistent effect on the future outcome. The optimal contract in a two-effort choice, two-period setting is characterized analytically and numerically. In particular, we show that persistence tends to make compensation less responsive to the first-period outcome. At the extreme, there are cases where the agent is perfectly insured against the first-period outcome: the agent obtains the same utility regardless of the first-period outcome. The model is extended to three periods. We also present a computational method to characterize an N-period model with two-period persistence.Received: 9 December 2003, Revised: 13 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D82, J31, J65. Correspondence to: Ayegül ahinWe are grateful to an anonymous referee, Jack Barron, Mark Bils, Hugo Hopenhayn, Per Krusell, Lance Lochner, Steve Williamson, and seminar participants at Concordia University, Purdue University, the applied theory meetings at University of Rochester, the Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory 2003, the Rochester Wegmans Conference 2002, and the Society for Economic Dynamics Meetings 2003 for their comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank Vera Brencic, Nancy Marmon, and Roxanne Stanoprud for excellent research assistance.     

Evaluating the effects of entry regulations and firing costs on international income differences

This paper analyzes the effects of entry regulations and firing costs on cross-country differences in income and productivity. We construct a general equilibrium industry-dynamics model and quantitatively evaluate it using the cross-country data on entry costs and firing costs. Entry costs lower overall productivity in an economy by keeping low-productivity establishments in operation and making the establishment size inefficiently large. Firing costs lower productivity by reducing the reallocation of labor from low-productivity establishments to high-productivity establishments. The linear regression of the data on the model prediction accounts for 27% of the cross-sectional variation in total factor productivity. Moving the level of entry costs and firing costs from the U.S. level to that of the average of low income countries (countries with a Gross National Income below 2% of the U.S. level) reduces TFP by 27% in the model without capital, and by 34% in the model with capital and capital adjustment costs.     

Book Reviews

Jonathan R. Pincus (1996), Class, Power and Agrarian Change: Land and Labour in Rural West Java, Studies on the Economics of East and Southeast Asia, Macmillan, Hampshire, pp. xii + 248.

Pierre van der Eng (1996), Agricultural Growth in Indonesia' Productivity Change and Policy Impact since 1880, Macmillan and St Martin's Press, London and New York, pp. xii + 375. £50.00

Mari E. Pangestu and Yuri Sato (eds) (1997), Waves of Change in Indonesia's Manufacturing Industry, Institute of Developing Economies, Tokyo, pp xiv + 225.

Peter van Diermen (1997), Small Business in Indonesia, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. xvn + 234. Cloth: £37.50

Jonathan Rigg (1997), Southeast Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernization and Development, Routledge, London, pp. xxv + 326.

HaI Hill, Indonesia's Industrial Transformation, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp xix + 403.     

Analysing Mechanism of an Economic Phase

In this paper, we define the thetical and antithetical phases of macroeconomy on a formal basis. And we formulate a bubble economy and its collapse by using these definitions. The concept of thetical and antithetical phases is introduced into economics by Kinoshita. In the course of discussion, we also make clear the difference between economic growth and bubble economy, while describing a mechanism of collapse of a bubble economy by using a simple macro-economic model instead of a specific model. As a result, we can analyse not only the state of thetical economy phase, and antithetical economy phase, but also bubble economy phase and bubble bursting economy phase. And we can describe mechanism of transitions among four economic phases.