IUJ Repository (International Univ. of Japan)
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Elderly Care, Child Care, and Labor Supply in an Aging Japan
Get PDFThis paper numerically examines the impact of the financial and time cost of child care as well as elderly care on economic growth and welfare in an aging Japan within a dynamic general equilibrium framework of multi-period overlapping generations with endogenized labor supply. Simulation results indicate that the replacement rate of the public pension scheme becomes below 50 percent from year 2039, even if the currently accumulated public pension funds are used up for paying pension benefits by year 2115. Financial burdens for the first group (age 65 and over) and for the second group (age 40 - 64) in the public long-term care insurance in year 2060 become more than double and more than five times as much as the level of year 2010 in an aging Japan, respectively. While increased child benefits stimulate savings and thus they improve welfare, the impact of elimination of the time cost of child care and elderly care is quite mixed, depending on the gender and job contract types of workers within the household. When the time cost of elderly care spent by all workers irrespective of gender and job contract types is eliminated, many generations enjoy welfare gain, but when the time cost of child care by all workers is eliminated, then almost all generations, except for relatively elder generations, reversely suffer from welfare loss. When a starting age to contribute to the long-term care insurance becomes earlier from the current age of 40 to age 35, welfare of all generations improves.departmental bulletin pape
Education and Expenditure Inequality in Bhutan: An Analysis based on 2007 and 2012 Household Survey Data
Get PDFBased on the 2007 and 2012 Bhutan Living Standard Survey, this study examines the roles of education in expenditure inequality in Bhutan using several decomposition techniques. While the expansion of basic education appears to have narrowed urban-rural expenditure disparity, the expansion of higher education seems to have increased expenditure inequality among households with higher education. Together with a rise in expenditure disparity among educational groups, this has raised overall expenditure inequality. Basic education policies that could raise general educational level still serve as an effective means to mitigate expenditure inequality. Implementing effective higher education policies would be another important option, as the policies that could reduce inequality among households with higher education are crucial. There might be a mismatch between the needs of employers and the qualifications of people with higher education. The government thus needs to formulate and implement higher education policies that could mitigate the mismatch.departmental bulletin pape
Do Job Applicants also Discriminate Potential Employers? Evidence from the Worldfs Largest Online Labor Market
Get PDFA number of papers have examined labor-market discrimination in traditional labor markets and demonstrated that employers have strong tastes over job applicants. However, so far little is known about potential discrimination in online labor markets, where personal information on gender, race, age, education, etc. is not available. Moreover, few studies have discussed another potential discrimination against employers by job applicants. This paper answers this under-investigated question by using data from the world's largest online labor market, Freelancer.com, where all transactions are publicly observable. Estimation results show that applicants have strong preference over the jobs posted by employers from English-speaking developed countries. These employers receive 23.3% higher number of applications from higher-skilled workers, which results in 17.5% lower price through competition. By demonstrating these new empirical findings, this study contributes and bridges the literature on labor-market discrimination and that on online behavior.departmental bulletin pape
Negative Skill Sorting across Production Chains
Get PDFPrevious literature generally predicts that individuals with higher skills work in industries with longer production chains. However, the opposite skill-sorting pattern, a "negative skill-sorting" phenomenon, is also observed in reality. This paper proposes a possible mechanism by which both cases can happen and shows that negative skill sorting is more likely to occur when the quality of intermediate inputs degrade rapidly (or improves slowly) along the production chain. We empirically confirm our theoretical prediction by using country-industry panel data. The results are robust regardless of estimation method, control variables, and industry coverage. This study has important implications for understanding countries' comparative advantages and development patterns.departmental bulletin pape
Accountability, Political Views, and Bureaucratic Behavior: A Theoretical Approach
Get PDFThis study aims to theoretically develop a framework to predict bureaucratic behaviors with the political view dimension and the accountability dimension by adopting and extending Hirschman's (1970) exit, voice, and loyalty. The political ideology dimension is dichotomized based on whether a bureaucrat's political ideology is congruent or incongruent with his/her overhead politicalprincipals. The bureaucratic accountability dimension is also dichotomized between accountability to the overhead political principals and accountability to the public sentiment. With the given dimensions, the exit, voice, loyalty, and silence scenarios are discussed as possible bureaucratic behaviors. In addition, the stay scenario is discussed for passive bureaucrats regardless of the two dimensions. By incorporating studies on bureaucrats' political views, accountability, and Hirschman's bureaucratic behaviors, this study expects to contribute to a better understanding of bureaucrats.departmental bulletin pape
THE IMPACT OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH ON CHILD SURVIVAL IN GHANA
Get PDFThis paper pools four waves of data from Demographic and Health Surveys (from 1993 to 2008) to examine the impact of household wealth status on child survival in Ghana. The Weibull hazard model with gamma frailty was used to estimate the general wealth effect, as well as the trend of wealth effect on child's survival probability. We find that household wealth status has a negative and significant effect on the hazard rate. Thus a child is more likely to survive when he/she is from a household with high wealth status. Even though wealth effect declined over the years, the risk of death for children from the poorest households was about 1.7 times higher than those from the richest households. Among other factors, birth spacing and parental education are found to be highly significant to increase a child's survival probability.departmental bulletin pape
Quantitative Easing and the Labor Market in Japan
Get PDFThis paper studies the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy on the labor market. By using the Japan's data, we estimate structural vector autoregressive models. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that while unconventional monetary policy boosts output and employment significantly, its effects on inflation and nominal wages are limited.departmental bulletin pape
Unemployment and Wage Rigidity in Japan: A DSGE Model Perspective
Get PDFThis paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with labor market frictions and nominal wage rigidity. We estimate our model for Japan's economy using Bayesian methods. This allows us to estimate the structural parameters of the Japanese economy, the unobservable shocks and examine their transmission mechanism. We can also study how wage rigidity affects overall model performance. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of including nominal wage rigidity in explaining the Japanese data. We find that while nominal wage rigidity plays only a trivial role in inflation dynamics, it is crucial in determining the response of labor market variables to structural shocks.departmental bulletin pape
To Introduce or Not To Introduce Monetary Bonuses: The Cost of Repealing Teacher Incentives
Get PDFTeacher performance pay programs form the foundation of recent reforms in public education. Although existing research has found monetary bonuses for teachers increase student achievement, no studies have examined the potentially negative effects of repealing such incentives. Using novel data from North Carolina, where the state government first reduced and finally repealed its teacher incentive program, this paper shows that student achievement at the lowest-performing schools significantly decreased after the reduction in bonuses and further decreased after the repeal of the incentive program. These findings illustrate that once incentives are introduced it is not cost-free to reduce or remove them.departmental bulletin pape
THE COMMUNICATIVE DIMENSION AND SECURITY IN ASIA PACIFIC: A COMMUNICATIVE-VIEWING PROPOSAL FOR REFORM OF THE JAPANESE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
Get PDFThe postwar development of the Intelligence Services in Japan has been based on two contrasting models: the centralized model of the USA and the collegiality of UK, neither of which has been fully developed. This has led to clashes of institutional competencies and poor anticipation of threats towards national security. This problem of opposing models has been partially overcome through two dimensions: externally through the cooperation with the US Intelligence Service under the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security; and internally though the pre-eminence in the national sphere of the Department of Public Safety. However, the emergence of a new global communicative dimension requires that a communicative-viewing remodeling of this dual model is necessary due to the increasing capacity of the individual actors to determine the dynamics of international events. This article examines these challenges for the Intelligence Services of Japan and proposes a reform based on this new global communicative dimension.departmental bulletin pape