A Consumption-Based Explanation of Expected Stock Returns

When utility is nonseparable in nondurable and durable consumption and the elasticity of substitution between the two consumption goods is sufficiently high, marginal utility rises when durable consumption falls. The model explains both the cross‐sectional variation in expected stock returns and the time variation in the equity premium. Small stocks and value stocks deliver relatively low returns during recessions, when durable consumption falls, which explains their high average returns relative to big stocks and growth stocks. Stock returns are unexpectedly low at business cycle troughs, when durable consumption falls sharply, which explains the countercyclical variation in the equity premium.     

Bureaucratic Advice and Political Governance

This paper studies the conflict of interest between politicians and better-informed bureaucrats when they have differing preferences over a public project. We start with a baseline model where a bureaucrat advises a single decision maker (politician) whether to adopt a project. The bureaucrat can be punished if his misrepresentation of the project is detected. We extend this to multiple projects and multiple bureaucrats, and compare the level of Type I and Type II errors generated with centralized and decentralized decision making. This typically depends on the form of the distribution function that determines the bureaucrats' expectation of being disciplined.     

Information Sharing and Firm Performance in Japan

North American firms have begun to show greater interest in sharing private business information with unions and employees, a labor relations practice widely institutionalized in Japan. This study uses a survey of Japanese joint consultation committees and publicly available business data to examine the effects of information sharing on a firm's profitability, productivity, and labor cost. The results generally show a positive association of information sharing with profitability and productivity and a negative association with labor cost.     

TRADE IMPACTS ON SKILL ACQUISITION VIA VARIETY EXPANSION*

We show that trade enhances skill formation through gains from trade via variety expansion à la Krugman. Although workers are identical as unskilled labour, they differ in productivity as skilled labour. Workers become skilled by incurring training costs. By introducing these settings into a trade model with monopolistic competition, we show that, although trade makes all agents better off, its effect is stronger for skilled than unskilled workers, which stimulates skill acquisition. As a result of less productive workers becoming skilled, the wage dispersion among skilled workers increases.     

QUANTITY OR QUALITY: THE IMPACT OF LABOUR SAVING INNOVATION ON US AND JAPANESE GROWTH RATES, 1960–2004*

This article deals with both theoretical and empirical analyses of the post‐war (1960–2004) growth for the USA and Japan. We investigated three factors contributing to growth: the growth rates of capital, labour and labour saving innovation. In Japan, the growth rate of the labour force has been much less important than its quality improvement—i.e. labour saving technical change—while in the USA, the growth rates of labour and population have contributed more than their quality improvement. The policy implication is that Japan's declining population can be compensated for by additional quality improvement of the existing labour force.     

Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life‐cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long‐term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and suboptimal choice is 3.2% of total wealth.     

Optimal Income Taxation with Risky Earnings: A Synthesis

We study optimal nonlinear income taxation when earnings can differ because of both ability and luck, so the income tax has both a redistributive role and an insurance role. A substantial literature on optimal redistribution in the absence of risk has evolved since Mirrlees's original contribution. The literature on the income tax as a social insurance device is more limited. It has largely assumed that households are ex ante identical so unequal earnings are due to risk alone. We provide a general treatment of the optimal income tax under risk when households differ in ability. We characterize optimal marginal tax rates and interpret them in terms of redistribution, insurance, and incentive effects. The case of ex ante identical households and the no‐risk case with heterogeneous abilities come out as special cases.     

Japanese Employees' Attitudes Toward Changes in Traditional Employment Practices

This study examines Japanese employees' attitudinal opposition to changes in such employment practices as nenko (seniority)-based wages and promotions, and implicit long-term employment guarantees for the regular workforce. The study shows that (1) overall, Japanese employees are strongly opposed to placing a cap on senior employees' pay and to mid-career transfers to subsidiary companies, and (2) the level of opposition is a function of their perceptions of unions' past performance and of employers' human resource policies.     

Altruism,Liquidity Constraint,and Investment in Education

In Japan and other East Asian societies, household educational expenditures per child (especially private tutoring expenditures) have increased sharply, perhaps to an excessive degree. This paper suggests a rationale for many families to invest extensively in education, whereas other relevant literature rarely addresses the possibility of excessive educational investment. Introducing altruism and liquidity constraints into a model in which parent and child interact for determining investment in the child's education, we show that educational investment may be excessive unless the family is profoundly liquidity‐constrained. Our result extends previous findings incorporating the Samaritan's Dilemma. We also discuss public policy designed to remedy the inefficiency in educational investment.