Japanese Economic Review最新文献

This paper discusses how childcare and parental leave policies affect female employment by reviewing the international evidence and recent papers on Japan. These papers estimate causal effects of policies by exploiting policy changes, which is a more credible identification strategy than those applied in earlier observational studies. The literature on parental leave finds that a more generous leave package tends to delay mothers’ return to work, but it does not have detrimental effects on maternal labour supply in the medium to long run. Some papers also find that provision of job protection for around 1 year can increase maternal employment, but longer job protection has little additional effects. The literature on childcare policies finds that maternal employment does not necessarily increase, because the expansion of childcare may crowd out informal childcare arrangements, such as care provided by grandparents. Findings by recent papers on Japan are largely consistent with the international evidence.

A local referendum was held in Kodaira City, Tokyo on 26 May 2013, but the voting box remained sealed. This was because the voter turnout did not reach the 50% threshold for opening the box. Based on the Rousseauian view on voting, we argue that this hurdle is unjustifiable and further question the adequacy of the local referendum even without such a hurdle. Finally, we examine the use of economic mechanisms for this type of collective choice instead of voting.

Using the Census on Establishments data in Korea, the present study revisits the role of firm age and size to explain aggregate employment dynamics. We confirm the finding of Haltiwanger et al. that no systematic inverse relationship exists between net job growth and firm size once firm age is controlled for. We find that small businesses are driving forces of aggregate employment growth but that such high growth is mostly driven by the entry of very small firms, which is offset by job destructions of a similar magnitude. Moreover, entrepreneurial activity occurs among very small firms, whereas large start-ups are rarely observed.

This paper aims to explain the mixed causality nexus between corruption and inflation. For that, we apply a panel vector autoregression model on a large sample of 180 countries over the period 1996–2014. Using two corruption indexes and subsample estimations, results provide evidence that the inflation–corruption nexus is bidirectional. The causal effect is more important from corruption to inflation. Interactions remain significant but heterogeneous across subsamples with different income levels. The corruption effect is persistent only in low–middle income economies and its adverse effect on inflation is weaker in high-income economies. The two-way relationship between inflation and corruption reflects the inability to control inflation and the situation of the poverty trap in some countries.

In this paper, we investigate the volatility of sales at the firm and the aggregate level using the longitudinal data set of the Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations (FSSC). The main findings are as follows. First, firm-level volatility decreased until the mid-1990s, but then increased again. Second, aggregate-level volatility steadily decreased until the mid-1990s and remained low after that. Third, decomposing the total variance of the growth rate of aggregated sales, we find that the divergence between firm-level and aggregate-level volatility is caused by the drastic decline and subsequent low level of the covariance of sales growth between different firms and the increase in individual firms' sales volatility.

The present paper describes the patterns of entry and post-entry growth in the Japanese manufacturing sector over the 2001–2007 period, pointing to similarities and differences with other countries. The paper also presents a detailed characterization of start-up dynamics at a more detailed (two-digit) sectoral level within the manufacturing sector. The analysis shows that in Japan the entry and growth of start-ups contribute relatively little to net job creation, as compared to other countries. The main reasons are a particularly low start-up rate and a growth rate of surviving new businesses that is among the lowest in the sample of countries analysed.

This paper investigates spatial Cournot competition in a circular city, where the maximal service range of a vehicle is less than half of the perimeter, and a firm needs to initiate more than two dispatches to serve the whole market. We examine a multi-stage game of location and transportation mode choices, and the subsequent quantity competition between duopoly firms. The findings reveal that non-maximum dispersion is the unique location equilibrium when duopoly firms deliver products in different transportation modes or when the transportation mode decisions are made endogenously and the fixed cost of a transportation instrument is relatively high.

We estimate a discrete-time version of the Vayanos and Vila (2009) preferred-habitat model, using Japanese government bond yield data. The estimated results indicate that bond excess returns become more sensitive to bond supply in the absence of a zero lower bound constraint unless arbitrageurs become willing to take on more risk.

Using experiments developed by Engelmann and Strobel (2004), this study investigates distributional preference in Japan. We find that just over half the people in the study have a maximin preference, approximately 7 to 19% have an efficiency preference, approximately 8% have a self-interest preference, and approximately 18% chose the allocation that would reduce the payoff to the rich and the poor, given that her/his payoff would remain constant. The last preference could be interpreted as what is referred to as “malice”, “deep envy” or a “feeling of vulnerability” in behavioural economics and cross-cultural psychology.