Local norms and shared beliefs in cohesive social groups regulate individual behavior in everyday economic life. I use a door-to-door field experiment where a hundred and twenty villagers recruited from twenty-three communities in a Japanese rural mountainous village play a simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma game. To examine whether a set of experiences shared through interactions among community members

The Labor Force Survey, a large-scale government statistics, and the causal forest algorithm are used to estimate the group average treatment effect of the COVID-19 on the employment status for each month from January to June 2020. We find that (1) because of the seasonality in employment status at monthly level, whether we use January 2020 as the base month for comparison, as done in most of the studies

Utilizing a unique firm-level survey in Japan that contains five-bin forecasts for sales, we document three findings. First, firm-level subjective uncertainty is highly and positively related to volatility of past firm growth. Second, there are substantial variations in subjective uncertainty across firms, with a long right tail with extremely high subjective uncertainty. In addition, firms that have

This study analyzes the altruistic and selfish motivations that underlie the payment made toward Japan’s Hometown Tax Donation system by the citizens, whereby they can pay the tax to municipalities other than the ones in which they reside and receive reciprocal gifts. Using the local government level panel data for 2008–2015, we find that the Great East Japan Earthquake led to an increase in payments

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments worldwide have been formulating and implementing different strategies to mitigate its social and economic impacts. We study the household consumption responses to Japan’s COVID-19 unconditional cash transfer program. Owing to frequent delays in local governments’ administrative procedures, the timing of the payment to households varied unexpectedly. Using

Changes in people’s behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic can be regarded as the result of two types of effects: the “intervention effect” (changes resulting from government orders for people to change their behavior) and the “information effect” (voluntary changes in people’s behavior based on information about the pandemic). Using age-specific mobile location data, we examine how the intervention

Nudge-based messages have been employed in various countries to encourage voluntary contact-avoidance and infection-prevention behaviors to control the spread of COVID-19. People have been repeatedly exposed to such messages; however, whether the messages keep exerting a significant impact over time remains unclear. From April to August 2020, we conducted a four-wave online survey experiment to examine

This paper estimates the effects of school closure on students’ study time and the number of messages sent from teachers to students using an online learning service. We find that both study time and message numbers increased significantly from the beginning of the school closure but they returned to pre-COVID-19 levels when the state of emergency ended in late May 2020. In addition, we find that students

This study quantitatively estimates the impacts of the partial privatization of Japanese national universities (as implemented in 2004) on research performance outcomes, which are aggregated and disaggregated across research fields. Japanese private universities can be viewed as counterfactuals not targeted by the reform for the same period, which provides within-country variations in this governance/managerial

This study considers strategic relations between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and privatization policy in a mixed duopoly. We investigate the impact of the order of sequential games and compare with simultaneous game to highlight the significant role of the foreign shareholding ratio of the CSR-firm. We show that the privatization-then-CSR case yields a lower (higher) degree of privatization

The relationship between health status at birth and short-term health has been established; however, the relationship with long-term health remains unclear, particularly in Japan. This study investigates the effect of birth weight on child development using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Newborns in the twenty-firstst Century—a nationwide birth cohort study conducted by the Ministry of Health

We study pre-order strategies in a two-period, continuous-valuation model with the presence of both demand uncertainty and consumer heterogeneity. Consumers face different levels of uncertainty about their valuations in the pre-order stage: experienced consumers know their individual valuations while inexperienced consumers only know the distribution of their valuations. We find that in the pre-order

We study the impact of taxation on human capital when the mortality of household agents is endogenously determined based on their past levels of consumption. We characterize and solve the dynamic optimization problem facing household agents in the economy. Even though all households in our economy have identical preferences and have access to the same human capital accumulation technology, with endogenous

This study revisits the strategic delegation game in a duopoly setting by generalizing the managerial incentives. Prior studies considered only the case when firms’ managers are incentivized by a linear combination of profits and a specific objective such as revenue or market share. By extending managerial incentives to a linear combination of profits and a quadratic function of firm outputs, we aim

This paper investigates monopolist sales strategies, especially a clearance sales strategy in which the firm keeps unsold products in stock and sells them at a discounted price in the next period. I focus on the effect of new product introduction on consumer behavior by using a durable-goods monopolist model with demand uncertainty. The result shows that without the introduction of new versions of

This paper proposes an econometric method to construct confidence sets for rankings by considering the situations in which data on a comparison between each pair of alternatives are available. The key idea is that if an alternative, say A, is ranked higher than some other alternative, say B, then it would be natural to assume that drawing an observation in which A is compared favorably with B is more

We determine the emergence of the Porter hypothesis in a large oligopoly setting where the industry-wide adoption of green technologies is endogenously determined as a result of competition among coalitions. We examine a framework where firms decide whether to be “brown” or “green” and compete in quantities. We find that the Porter hypothesis may emerge as a market configuration with all green firms

The original article can be found online.

Using a large sample of individual-level records in Japan speedboat racing where men and women racers participate, we investigated how racers’ performance meets fans’ pre-race expectations. To control for endogeneity bias, we measured the order of racers’ attractiveness randomly determined in each race and then used this order as instrument for measuring racers’ popularity. The fixed-effects IV estimations

This study investigates how industries with different patterns of firm heterogeneity distribute across countries by developing a three-sector general-equilibrium model. We show that the larger country is more specialized in the industry with heterogeneous (homogeneous) firms when trade costs are low (high) and that an increase in the inter-industry difference in firm heterogeneity fosters the larger

This paper re-estimates the regional job-matching function using annual panel data covering 47 Japanese prefectures from 1987 to 2013, controlling for spillovers and agglomeration effects across prefectures, in addition to prefecture-level labor market determinants and prefecture and time fixed effects. The estimates reveal that the number of job matches rises together with rising stocks of unemployed

This study investigates how a revenue-maximizing tax strategy of local and central governments incorporates dual networks, namely, an inter-firm transaction network and an inter-country geography network. We assume a two-stage game in which governments propose discriminatory tax levels for firms, whereas each firm has an incentive to invest in a country near the foreign branch office of its transaction

This study investigates how the structure of a domestic firm-to-firm transaction network influences the foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions of embedded firms in the network. We theoretically describe firms’ FDI decisions using an incomplete information game that considers the firm-to-firm transactions of intermediate inputs and in which firms have an incentive to collocate with their trading

Human travel patterns are commonly studied as networks in which the points of departure and destination are encoded as nodes and the travel frequency between two points is recorded as a weighted edge. However, because travelers often visit multiple destinations, which constitute pathways, an analysis incorporating pathway statistics is expected to be more informative over an approach based solely on

Much of the research on networks using patent data focuses on citations and the collaboration networks of inventors, hence regarding patents as a positive sign of invention. However, patenting is, most importantly, a strategic action used by companies to compete with each other. This study sheds light on inter-organisational adversarial relationships in patenting for the first time. We constructed

The original article can be found online.

Understanding the demand for cash and noncash payment methods is an important policy concern in Japan, as the Japanese government aims at a cashless economy. Previous studies show that the demand for specific payment methods depends not only on the motivations of the kind of transactions, such as day-to-day transactions or hoarding, but also on payment contexts, such as bill payments or online payments

This paper introduces into an overlapping generations model the civil court’s inability to distinguish different qualities of goods of the same kind. This friction prevents the enforcement of real credit contracts through the civil court. Given this environment, fiat money is introduced into the model as an intrinsically useless, but recognizable instrument for the court. With fiat money, there exists

In this paper, we consider that the public firm competes with a private firm caring about consumer surplus in vertically differentiated market. We explore the privatization policy, and the relationship between the optimal degree of privatization and the CSR degree of private firm. We find that if the public firm produces low-quality products, the government should adopt a policy of privatization, and

This research shows that accounting for structural breaks within the asymmetric GJR-GARCH model reduces volatility persistence in stock and oil returns. More importantly, we ascertain that good news has less impact on current volatility if sudden changes are accounted for, while bad news has more impact in all cases with an exception of Nikkei225. Our findings are in line with previous studies and

We study a two-period model of a duopoly with goods differentiated by quality. The periods’ length corresponds to the goods’ useful lifespan, and consumers are heterogeneous in their valuation of quality. In the second period, the regulator fixes a minimum quality standard based either on the quality supplied by the high-quality firm in the first period (strict regulation) or on the average quality