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

This study compares the utilization of energy and emission taxes as instruments of pollution control and the promotion of advanced abatement technology adoption in a Cournot oligopoly. We examine multistage games in which the government sets the environmental tax rate. Oligopolistic firms may produce two outputs, a final consumption good, whose production causes pollution, and an abatement product

This study examines how research collaboration of firms affects the quality of their innovation outcomes using comprehensive patent data for firms in the world from 1991 to 2010. Identifying research collaboration by co-patenting relationships, we find that research collaboration with other firms, particularly with foreign firms, leads to substantial improvement in innovation quality. We also observe

This paper compares several forecasting methods using high-dimensional macroeconomic data from Japan. The diffusion index (DI) model has been widely used to incorporate the information contained in high-dimensional data for forecasting. We propose two selection methods of the number of latent factors in the DI model and compare the DI model with the vector autoregression (VAR) model whose parameters

The article "Refinements and higher-order beliefs: a unified survey", written by Atsushi Kajii and Stephen Morris.

The article, Notes on “refinements and higher order beliefs”, written by Atsushi Kajii and Stephen Morris, was originally published Online First without Open Access. After publication in volume 71, issue 1, page 35–41 the Japanese Economic Association decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to ©The Author(s)

The article Non‑equivalence between all and canonical elaborations, written by Satoru Takahashi.

This paper examines the long-term consequences of elementary school curricula on the formation of social preferences. The estimation results, using Japanese data, show that the hidden (non-academic) curriculum at public elementary schools varies widely by region and is associated with preference formation. Specifically, people who have experienced participatory and cooperative learning practices are

This paper proposes efficient tests for quantile parameter instability in parametric and semiparametric setups. In each setup, various types of unstable parameter processes are examined such as single structural break, multiple structural breaks, and random parameters, and the optimal test is suggested for each unstable process. In a parametric model, tick-exponential family of distributions is used

I estimate the relationship between combinations of multiple services for formal at-home elder care and health status. As a reasonable substitute for expensive institutional care, at-home formal elderly care is gaining popularity in developed countries. Because at-home care is composed of many small and complementary services, the relationship between multiple service combinations and health status

This paper uses relatively large-scale internet survey data from Japan to analyse income comparisons and income satisfaction. In contrast to the vast majority of empirical work in the area of subjective well-being, we are able to measure both the direction (to whom?) and intensity (how much?) dimensions of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues

This study estimates the degree of the transmission of income shocks to consumption using the partial insurance model of Blundell et al. (2008) and data taken from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers that cover the recessions in the 2000s. The analysis finds that the transmission of permanent income shocks to consumption was insured by half, whereas transitory income shocks were almost fully insured

Often empirical researchers face many data constraints when estimating models of demand. These constraints can sometimes prevent adequate evaluation of policies. In thi