Did Japan's shopping coupon program increase spending?

In March 1999, 31 million “shopping coupons” worth 20,000 yen each were distributed to Japanese families with children and to the elderly. The coupons expired after six months and could only be used within the recipient's local community. We use variation in the number of children across families and in the number of recipients across prefectures to measure the effect of the coupons on spending. We find that coupons had a positive effect on spending on semi-durables, but no effect on spending on nondurables or services. The marginal propensity to consume on semi-durables was 0.1–0.2 when the coupons were distributed in March. The results using regional variation provide stronger evidence that spending did not fall after the coupons had been redeemed.     

The effects of consumption externalities in an R&D-based growth model with endogenous skilled and unskilled labor supply

We examine the roles of consumption externalities in a variety-expansion growth model. By assuming that the R&D sector is more skilled labor intensive than the consumption goods sector, we extend the model of Doi and Mino (J Econ Dyn Control 32:3055?C3083, 2008) so that both the skilled and unskilled labor supplies are endogenously determined through the skill acquisition process. We show that some results of Doi and Mino are influenced by our modification. For example, in contrast to Doi and Mino who show that the R&D subsidy can have a negative growth effect in the presence of consumption externalities, we show that the R&D subsidy has unambiguously positive growth effects, regardless of the presence of consumption externalities. Further, it is shown that the presence of consumption externalities influences various aspects of the economy including the wage inequality and the incentive of skill acquisition.     

Competitive price paths of an exhaustible resource with increasing extraction costs

The paper analyzes the competitive growth paths of an economy with an exhaustible resource which is subject to increasing extraction costs, assuming perfect foresight. It establishes equivalence among the competitive present-value maximization condition for deposit holders, the generalized Hotelling rule, and the Ricardian royalty-price structure. It also proves uniqueness of a competitive growth path for the case where a backstop technology exists, in order to give some validity to the assumption of perfect foresight.     

Comparison of attitudes towards school lunch by elementary school children in Japan,Korea and Thailand

The attitudes of elementary school children towards school lunch among three Asian countries, namely Japan, Korea and Thailand, were compared. More school children in Japan felt that their teachers gave them advice during the school lunch programme. Japanese and Korean teachers advised their children to eat as much as possible of the lunch. Korean children may be a little more obedient with regard to heeding the advice. However, few teachers in Thailand gave the children advice over eating lunch, and the Thai children looked forward to and enjoyed the school lunch. The different responses between Thailand and other two countries may be attributed in part to the differences in the teachers' instruction in the programme. Elementary school teachers, especially in Thailand and Korea, have to take more classes in food and nutrition in universities or colleges, and positively take part in the school lunch programme.     

Non-paternalistic Altruism and Utility Interdependence

This paper clarifies the notion of non-paternalistic altruism through the use of utility aggregators. It presents conditions for the existence of non-paternalistically altruistic utility functions and provides a complete characterization of such utility functions. The results are used to generalize the Second Theorem of Welfare Economics and to prove the existence of an equilibrium in a game of voluntary gift-giving.
JEL Classification Nos.: D11, D64.     

Financial Sector Risk and the Stock Returns: Evidence from Tokyo Stock Exchange Firms

We investigate whether the activity of financial firms creates value and/or risk to the economy within the asset pricing framework. We use stock return data from nonfinancial firms listed in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The value-weighted index that is solely composed of nonfinancial firms is augmented with the index of the firms from the financial sector, and we estimate multivariate asset pricing model with these two indices. We note that our procedure can simultaneously take into account the cross-holding phenomena among Japanese firms, especially between the financial sector and the nonfinancial sector. Our augmented index model performs well both with cross-sectional Fama and MacBeth regression test and GMM test. Our two index model with additional Fama and French's HML factor can capture cross-sectional variations of the returns of sample portfolios better than the original Fama and French model can, when measured by Hansen and Jagannathan distance measure. We find that this additional new sector variable can be a substitute for Fama and French's size factor, but not related to the bond index return. This variable has similar factor characteristic as money supply growth or the term structure, but the latter variables contain more information than the former. Morever, our financial sector model helps explain the return and risk structure of Japanese firms during the so-called bubble period.     

Robust pricing with refunds

Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing and trying out the product. We show that the seller can use a simple mechanism to take best advantage of the buyer's post-purchase learning to maximize his guaranteed-profit. We show that this mechanism combines a generous refund, which performs well when the buyer is relatively informed, with non-refundable random discounts, which work well when the buyer is relatively uninformed.     

Dissemination of Accruals Information,Role of Semi‐Annual Reporting,and Analysts' Earnings Forecasts: Evidence from Japan

Our study investigates the effects of dissemination of accounting accruals information on stock prices using Japanese annual reports as our sample. We conduct month‐by‐month detailed analyses of price adjustment behavior with a particular focus on revisions of analysts' earnings forecasts and changes in trading volume around the period of upcoming semi‐annual reports. We find that analysts' forecasts are often revised around this time, and analysts use this as auxiliary information. In addition, an accompanying re‐adjustment of abnormal returns and an increase in trading volume are observed. Our findings demonstrate that informational uncertainty initially triggered by the announcement of annual reports decreases as semi‐annual reports are disclosed and analysts change their earnings forecasts, and confirms the importance of semi‐annual reporting.     

Dynamic analysis of wage inequality and creative destruction

Journal of Economics - This paper investigates the transitional dynamics of a basic Schumpeterian growth model under constant relative risk aversion. In this model, there are three patterns...     

A turnpike theorem for rolling plans

This paper analyzes the asymptotic properties of rolling plans in a multi-sector growth model with time-independent preferences and technology. Assuming that the model under consideration has a unique turnpike towards which all the finite optimal programs bend, the paper shows that, if plans are constantly revised with a fixed but sufficiently long planninghorizon, the resulting growth path converges to a neighborhood of the turnpike.