IUJ Repository (International Univ. of Japan)
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To Bond or to Bridge? Contingent Effects of Managers' Social Capital on Organizational Performance
Get PDFA top manager's social capital is considered as a critical resource for determining organizational outcome. However, little is known about the impacts of social capital on public organizations' performance. By dimensionalizing social capital into two, this study investigates impacts of a superintendent's bonding and bridging social capital on the performance of school districts. Findings show that bridging social capital has positive impacts on organizational performance but in a time of financial difficulty, it worsens negative shocks of financial difficulty. Bonding social capital is found to be exactly the opposite. This study argues that bonding and bridging social capital is not an "either-or" question and top managers are required to balance the two contingent on the situation that their organizations face.departmental bulletin pape
Should E-government Be Transformational and Participatory? An Essay on E-government in the Utilitarian Mode of Information Technology Use
Get PDFThis paper asserts that e-government works, in principle, in the utilitarian mode of information technology use rather than solidary and participatory modes. E-government stakeholders visit government Web sites to pursue material incentives and rarely expect interactions and e-democracy there although senior/executive managers tout transformational and participatory e-government symbolically and/or ostensibly for their political gain. The notion of transformational e-government is almost rhetoric and has a reversed causal relationship that egovernment reforms government. Government reflects or shapes e-government. Due to the administrative neutrality, e-democracy is not likely or its effect will not be significant. Participation in the policy processes will be plausible when motivated and qualified users and civil servants/managers are available. In general, e-government itself is not transformational and participatory, but rather instrumental to get utilitarian incentives.departmental bulletin pape
Timing of Motherhood and Economic Growth
Get PDFThe postponement of motherhood has drawn much attention in recent research. Yet, it is the U shape pattern of the mean age of the mother at first birth that observed in the data in 1950-2005. This phenomena can not be fully explained by the explanatory variables of the delay of motherhood documented in the empirical and theoretical literature. This paper develops a theoretical model to jointly consider females' decisions on motherhood timing, as well as human capital accumulation, working, and resources spent on child rearing. The calibration results successfully generate the U shape pattern of age at maternity along the growth path. Our explanations differ from the existing\nhuman capital story, by taking into account that child rearing affects mother's decisions on human capital investment both before and after motherhood. The model predicts that the delay in motherhood timing will continue.departmental bulletin pape
Labor donation or money donation? Pro-sociality on prevention of natural disasters in a case of cyclone AILA, Bangladesh
Get PDFThe coastal zone in Bangladesh is the most powerfully lethal due to cyclones and storm hazard where 29% of the total population reside. Thus, collective disaster mitigation measures are urgent, and it is important to understand people's pro-social attitude toward such countermeasures. However, few studies on this issue have been conducted in the context of developing\ncountries, such as Bangladesh, and we therefore address this issue. We made a questionnaire survey of 1,000 respondents and elicited (i) a willingness to donate their labor (WDL) and (ii) a willingness to pay (WTP) to collective countermeasures for avoiding the damages from cyclones and associated disasters. With this data, we examine WDL and WTP in relation to respondents' occupation, education and income. The novelty lies in offering respondents an option of choosing WDL and/or WTP in the questionnaire. The study finds that the poor and less educated people are likely to choose WDL and willing to donate more labor, while rich and educated people are likely to choose WTP and willing to donate more money. However, we also find that voluntary labor donation from poor and less educated people is significant in that overall donation from poor and less educated people exceeds that from rich and educated people. Overall, poor and less educated people may be more pro-social and WDL is an important source of contribution to be utilized in natural disaster mitigation of developing countries. This finding can be considered a useful guidance for future policies in more general cases, since it is consistent with observed labor donations for the recovery in the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, Japan.departmental bulletin pape
An Estimated Search and Matching Model of the Japanese Labor Market
Get PDFThis paper studies how well a simple search and matching model can describe aggregate Japanese labor market dynamics in a full information setting. We develop a discrete-time search and matching model with a convex vacancy posting cost and three shocks: productivity, separation, and markup shocks. We use the model as a data-generating process for our empirical analysis and estimate it by using Bayesian methods. The model is successful in replicating the behavior of unemployment and vacancies in Japan. However, we also find that the success of the model relies on shock processes that are not empirically plausible.departmental bulletin pape
Multitasking Incentives and Biases in Subjective Performance Evaluation
Get PDFSubjective performance evaluation serves as a double-edged sword. While it can mitigate multitasking agency problems, it also opens the door to evaluators' biases, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of worker quits. Using the personnel records of individual sales representatives in a major car sales company in Japan, we provide direct evidence for both sides of subjective performance evaluation: (1) the sensitivity of evaluations to sales performance declines with the marginal productivity of hard-to-measure tasks, and (2) measures of potential evaluation bias we construct are positively associated with worker quits, after correcting for possible endogeneity biasesdepartmental bulletin pape
The Role of Public Sector Investment for Economic Development in Emerging Countries: The Case of Lao PDR
Get PDFRecently, the Lao PDR has achieved high economic growth at around 7-8 percent annually which is very stable and robust growth in Asian economic dynamics, in particular in ASEAN. Vital public investments play an important role to develop social infrastructures and then strengthen the supply-side economy. This paper analyzes the macroeconomic structure and causes of high economic growth of Lao PDR by utilizing a macroeconometric model. According to the econometric analysis, vital public sector investment behaviors have caused to strengthen the supply-side economy and exports, which resulted in foreign capital and public investment increases through its virtuous circle.departmental bulletin pape
Perceptions to climatic changes and cooperative attitudes toward flood protection in Bangladesh
Get PDFBangladesh is vulnerable to climatic changes, and there has been a serious debate about the occurrence and the relationship with the frequency of flooding. For example, in Dhaka, further flood controls are claimed to be necessary due to a change of climatic patterns and more frequent flood events. Despite the importance of this topic, it has received little research attention. Thus, we examine (i) whether a temporal change in climate variables is occurring, (ii) local people's perceptions to climate and (iii) cooperative attitudes toward flood controls. We conducted face-to-face surveys with 1,011 respondents of different social and demographic strata and seven experts in Bangladesh. Using these data, we first derive a temporal trend of climate variables and analyze how closely people's perceptions align with the climate data. Second, we examine the willingness to pay for flood controls as a proxy of cooperative attitudes, and characterize the determinants in relation to perceptions to climate as well as socio-economic characteristics. We obtain the following principal results. First, some climate variables are identified to exhibit clear upward or downward trends, but most people correctly perceive such temporal changes. More specifically, people's perceptions and our statistical analysis are identical in the qualitative changes of climate. Second, people who correctly perceive climatic changes tend to express a higher WTP than those who do not. Overall, these findings suggest that accurate climate perceptions are keys to increasing cooperation into managing climate change and related disasters.departmental bulletin pape
Finding good managers: an econometric case study of a large Japanese auto dealership
Get PDFUsing the personnel and transaction data from a large auto dealership in Japan, this paper discusses the value, incentives, assignments, determinants of performance, and learning of managers. We find that: (1) moving one standard deviation up the distribution of manager fixed effects raises a branch's profit by 9.3%; (2) the relationship between managers' branch assignments and their performance is more consistent with tournament theory rather than screening or learning mechanism; (3) better managers are systematically selected to run less profitable branches; and (4) managers with smaller age difference with subordinates and broader experience tend to perform better.departmental bulletin pape
Fiscal Stimuli in the Form of Job Creation Subsidies
Get PDFThis paper examines the effects of fiscal stimuli in the form of job creation subsidies in a DSGE model with search frictions in the labor market. We consider two types of job creation subsidies: a subsidy to the cost of posting vacancies and a hiring subsidy. Our model demonstrates that qualitative effects of a vacancy cost subsidy are similar to those of a hiring subsidy. Quantitatively, however, the vacancy cost subsidy is more effective in lowering unemployment than the hiring subsidy. We also compute fiscal multipliers for both traditional increases in government spending and increases in job creation subsidies.departmental bulletin pape