Factors determining residents’ preparedness for floods in modern megalopolises: the case of the Tokai flood disaster in Japan

This study examines how flood risk perception and home ownership affect residents’ preparedness for floods, focusing specifically on the case of the Tokai flood disaster in Nagoya City, one of Japan’s biggest metropolises, in 2000. The greatest rainfall ever recorded in Nagoya City (566.5 mm) occurred on 11–12 September 2000; as a result, a local river burst its banks and flooded the city. A survey was conducted of residents of the affected area in Nagoya City and its adjacent region. The respondents were asked to rate the extent of their experience with, anticipation of, and preparedness for floods before and after the Tokai disaster in terms of taking special measures against floods. The results showed that the degree of preparedness for floods was determined by the level of fear of floods and the amount of damage sustained during the Tokai flood, especially for homeowners. However, the residents’ preparedness did not depend on their anticipation of floods. These findings show that preparedness for floods depends on ownership of a home, fear of flooding, and the amount of damage from previous floods rather than on previous experience with and anticipation of floods.     

A paradigm shift from production function to production copula: statistical description of production activity of firms

The heterogeneity of economic agents is emphasized in a new trend in macroeconomics. Accordingly, the new emerging discipline requires one to replace the production function, one of the key ideas in conventional economics, by an alternative that can take explicit account of the distribution of firms' production activities. In this paper we propose a new idea referred to as a production copula; a copula is an analytic means for modeling the dependence among variables. Such a production copula predicts the value added by firms with given capital and labor in a probabilistic way. It is thereby in sharp contrast to the production function, where the output of firms is completely deterministic. We demonstrate the empirical construction of a production copula using financial data of listed Japanese firms. Analysis of the data shows that there are significant correlations among capital, labor and value added, and confirms that the values added are too widely scattered to be represented by a production function. We employ four models for the production copula, that is trivariate versions of Frank, Gumbel and survival Clayton and non-exchangeable trivariate Gumbel. The latter was found to be the best.     

Using Nonnormal Distributions to Analyze the Relationship Between Stock Returns in Japan and the US

The Pearson distribution system is researched and applied to financial engineering (Nagahara, Financ Eng Jpn Mark 2(2):139–154 in 1995, Financ Eng Jpn Mark 3(2):121–149 in 1996, Stat Prob Lett 43:251–264 in 1999, J Time Ser Anal 24(6):721–738 in 2003, A method of fitting multivariate nonnormal distributions to financial data. Discussion paper of Institute of Social Sciences, F-2006-2, Meiji University in 2006, Asia Pac Financial Markets 15(3–4):175–184 in 2008a). And a method of fitting multivariate nonnormal distributions by using random numbers from the Pearson distribution system was developed (Nagahara, Comput Stat Data Anal 47(1):1–29 in 2004). This method uses the grid search of the parameters for the maximum likelihood. In this paper, we adopt Grid-Computing and its middleware for the parameter sweep in order to reduce the computational time and the workload of this method. In the area of the financial risk management, it is very important to analyze the relationship between stock returns in Japan and the US. We analyze the data based on the same date and the following date because Japanese stock market opens before the US stock market opens in a day. We compare these returns by means of the multivariate nonnormal distributions by using this method. And we test the international transmission of stock markets movement. Furthermore, we obtain the optimal job schedule for our computer system using the middleware in order to reduce the computational time.     

Jane Jacobs on Henry George: Progress or Poverty?

Henry George and Jane Jacobs each have devoted followers today who remain mainly outside the intellectual mainstream, both are iconic American intellectuals largely sympathetic to and quite knowledgeable about how markets work, and they each challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxies of their day. Much has been written, pro and con, on George's single tax and on Jacobs's battles with urban planners, and while I don't directly address either here, what I say does have implications for those controversies. In particular, I show how and why their views on the nature of economic progress, and of cities in that progress, fundamentally differ. I trace the difference to George's essentially classical approach to economics in contrast to Jacobs's subjectivist approach, which more radically transcends the economics of her time.     

Correlated performance of firms in a transaction network

The correlation of firms’ performance on a transaction network is studied by analyzing financial and transaction data. Statistically significant correlation coefficients are obtained as evidence for the firm interactions. The firm interactions are taken into account in the basic equation of firm activity. Forty percent of residuals are explained by considering the firm interactions. The overall structure of the transaction network, i.e., the connectivity of industry sectors, is analyzed.     

Non-Gaussian distribution for stock returns and related stochastic differential equation

Daily returns of stock prices are observed to have heavy-tailed and non-central distribution. In this paper, we adopt the type VII and IV family of Pearson System to express the daily returns of stock prices. Furthermore, we consider related stochastic differential equation whose stationary distribution are the type VII or IV of Pearson system, and estimate the parameters of stochastic differential equation by maximum likelihood method, where the transition probability density function and local linearization method are used. This paper is the basic research for the risk management.The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, 4-6-7 Minami-Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 106 Japan.     

Hermeneutics and the Heidegger = Schumpeter Theses

This paper is a part of an attempt to develop an economic philosophy of ontology based on the Continental tradition of hermeneutics. Ontology explores the meanings of entities as the objects of knowledge to posit the orientation of knowledge. Heidegger developed hermeneutical ontology, focusing on the self-understanding of Dasein (human beings), which consists of the "projection" of its possibilities into the future and the "thrownness" of it into the restrictions by the past history. Dealing explicitly with the pre-structure of knowledge, hermeneutics opens the perspective of knowledge much broader than permitted by the analytical tradition of philosophy. It is the contention of this paper that Schumpeter from the Austrian subjectivist circle could cope with this approach in social science by the use of the concepts of "innovation and tradition" or "creation and routine." The paper discusses the relationship between Heidegger and Schumpeter on various philosophical issues and derives what might be called the Heidegger = Schumpeter theses.     

The struggle to survive in the R&D sector: Implications for innovation and growth

By allowing for investment activities by research and development (R&D) firms to prevent product obsolescence, we show that if legal patent protection is too strong, a higher R&D subsidy rate delivers insufficient investments for survival in the R&D sector, depressing innovation and growth in the long run.