Equity market and foreign capital

Abstract .  I present a model that demonstrates that the market mechanism is not always effective in stabilizing an open equity market. Foreign capital inflows create multiple equilibria in the equity market, which may simultaneously trigger a currency crisis as well as an equity market crash even if the equity market is well developed.     

Targeted saving by renters for housing purchase in Japan

This paper examines the extent to which wealth accumulation for housing purchase increases household savings and suppresses consumption. The study employs an estimation method based on simultaneous equations with limited dependent variables developed by Nelson and Olson to examine the relationship between wealth accumulation and housing purchase plans, using data relating to young Japanese renters. The estimation results provide evidence that young Japanese households severely reduce their consumption by around 30–40 percent.     

Challenges to elderly safety in Safe Community movements in Japan

In Japan, with the longest life expectancy in the world over the last two decades, a great emphasis has been placed on the safety of the elderly, which has in turn influenced their well-being. Meantime, the concept of Safe Community (SC) has drawn more attention as one of the potential measures to sustain and improve the health conditions of the elderly. In hope of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of current efforts for elderly safety, the SC model is expected to provide features with which communities can make the better use of current limited resources. This article examines how the SC model makes a difference in these efforts by utilising existing programmes and how elderly safety can be promoted at the community level. Six communities working safety promotion based on the SC model were selected for the study. Although there are limitations to the information due to the insufficient experience in SC in Japan, it was found that two features make SC significant in promoting safety: (1) systematic evidence-based plan-do-check-action processes and (2) a framework of cross-sectoral collaboration. However, to examine and identify the effectiveness of SC on elderly health, further observation is required to develop strategies while accumulating longitudinal data.     

EKC-type transitions and environmental policy under pollutant uncertainty and cost irreversibility

Previous studies have suggested that some pollutant levels first increases due to the economic growth and then start decreasing, the pattern being called the “environmental Kuznets curve” (EKC). We examine EKC-type transitions of pollutant levels not with respect to economic growth but more generally in time. Assuming that each policy maker optimally executes the two switching options of regulation and unregulation for pollution, the switching dynamics of environmental policy can be described by an alternating renewal process. It is shown that the double Laplace transform of transition density of a pollutant level can be obtained by a novel application of renewal theory. The expected level of overall pollutants is then calculated numerically and found to exhibit either a Λ‐shaped or an N-shaped pattern in time. Our results present a simple explanation for the EKC-type transitions of pollutant levels within a real options framework.     

Comments’ Extraction by User ID,Keywords, and Anchor Texts from the Thread of a Bulletin Board System

Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) on the Web are used by many users posting comments on threads. Each thread carries a subject of discussion. Most users post comments related to a subject. However, unrelated comments are also posted. The unrelated comments distract users and diminish their understanding of the entire story of a thread. Comments unrelated to a subject have to be filtered automatically. This paper proposes a method that extracts comments related to a thread subject from a thread of BBS. The method extracts two types of comments: comments related to a thread subject (main comments), and comments related to main comments (sub-comments). The main comments are extracted by a user ID and keywords in the comments. The sub-comments are extracted by explicit and implicit anchor texts in the comments. We experimented with the proposed method and verified that comments extracted by the proposed method support participants in understanding the entire story of a thread.     

Investment and capital structure decisions of foreign subsidiary with international debt shifting and exchange rate uncertainty

This paper examines the impact of international debt shifting and exchange rate uncertainty on investment and capital structure decisions of foreign subsidiary. We find that debt shifting induces earlier investment, earlier default, higher leverage, and larger ex ante firm value of foreign subsidiary. When debt shifting is not so costly, the optimal leverage of foreign subsidiary increases as the tax rate differential increases. Moreover, when the correlation between exchange rate and foreign cash flow uncertainties is positive (negative, respectively), foreign investment advances as exchange rate uncertainty increases (decreases) as well as the correlation increases. These results reveal that the impact of debt shifting and exchange rate uncertainty on investment and capital structure policies cannot be ignored, supporting existing empirical findings.     

Consumption-Leisure Preference Structure: A New Explanation of the Evans-Jovanovic Results for Entrepreneurial Choice

This paper extends Evans and Jovanovic’s (1989) (EJ) model to explicitly consider the latent entrepreneur’s consumption-leisure preference structure, and shows that an increase in his or her assets encourages entrepreneurial activity. This result indicates that EJ’s finding may hold without the assumption of liquidity constraints.