CAPACITY EXPANSION IN MARKETS WITH INTER‐TEMPORAL CONSUMPTION EXTERNALITIES

This paper analyses market capacity expansion in the presence of inter‐temporal consumption externalities such as consumer learning, networks and bandwagon effects. An externality leads to an endogenous shift of market demand that responds to past market capacity. Whereas market capacity grows in waves, its magnitude depends on the degree of market concentration. The competitive environment contributes to S‐shaped time patterns of market capacity expansion. On the other hand, using a low introductory price, a monopolist plans an initially larger amount of market cultivation than a competitive market capacity expansion.     

NONPARAMETRIC LIKELIHOOD: EFFICIENCY AND ROBUSTNESS*

Nonparametric likelihood is a natural generalization of parametric likelihood and it offers effective methods for analysing economic models with nonparametric components. This is of great interest, since econometric theory rarely suggests a parametric form of the probability law of data. Being a nonparametric method, nonparametric likelihood is robust to misspecification. At the same time, it often achieves good properties that are analogous to those of parametric likelihood. This paper explores various applications of nonparametric likelihood, with some emphasis on the analysis of biased samples and data combination problems.     

Income Tax Reforms and Redistribution by Age Group: Evidence From Japan

In the 1980s, tax policy changes mitigated the redistributive effect of income tax. The present study attempts to explore how different the redistributive effect of the income tax reforms in Japan is among age groups, using Japanese household microdata for the period 1984–2009. The following results are obtained. First, the overall redistributive effect was greatest for the elderly group, followed by the middle‐aged group, and then the young group. Furthermore, this trend increased steadily over time. Second, the difference in total redistributive effects between the young and elderly increased owing to a large reduction in the base effect for the young.     

How to Make the Japanese Public Pension System Reliable and Workable

This paper has two objectives. The first is to identify current problems in Japan's pension administration. The chief problem is a weak governance structure. In particular, the current governance structure ignores the role of pension participants. A rigorous division and clear assignment of responsibilities to each of the pension participants, the Social Insurance Agency, and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare is urgently needed. Given rapid demographic change, the second objective is to consider the case for full tax financing of the National Basic Pension. It is estimated that the net burden would vary across different cohorts, but we demonstrate that the net burden can be smoothed across different cohorts. This result is quite different from that in the 2008 Interim Report of the Japanese National Council on Social Security.