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Measuring Search Frictions Using Japanese Microdata
Get PDF* Revised: [11-07, 2011]This paper estimates matching functions to measure search frictions in theJapanese labor market and presents determinants of search duration to explain the effectof unemployment benefits on a job seeker's behavior. We employ administrative microdata that track the job search process of individuals who left or lost their job in August2005 and subsequently registered at their local public employment service. Our findingis that the matching function would exhibit decreasing returns-to-scale for job seekersand vacancies, rather than constant return-to-scale. We also find that generousunemployment benefits lengthen (shorten) the duration of job search for job seekerswho voluntarily (involuntarily) leave employment
The Relative Utility Hypothesis With and Without Self-reported Reference Wages
Get PDFNovember 2010, Revised July 2012This article makes three main contributions to the economics of happiness literature. First, using a novel data set of about 90,000 Japanese workers surveyed in annual cross-sections between 1990 and 2004, it demonstrates that individuals experience strong disutility when they perceive that their coworkers earn relatively higher wages. In contrast with other tests of the relative utility hypothesis in the literature, our estimation relies on workers’ self-reported beliefs of their peers’ wages, which we argue are more closely aligned to the “true” reference-group benchmark than the assumed comparison income measures employed in other studies. Second, the article shows important heterogeneous effects of both absolute and relative income on happiness. In particular, workers who are better able to accurately predict their peers’wages seem to experience both greater utility of higher own income and greater disutility of higher relative income. Third, we assess the validity of different methodologies that the literature has employed to construct comparison income measures and find significant discrepancies, particularly when reference income is derived from Mincer equations–a common approach in other studies. We demonstrate that such discrepancies stem from the difficulty in finding valid exclusion restrictions that help identify the relative income effect on happiness. In the absence of self-reported reference wages, we propose a simple IV strategy that does not eliminate the lack of consistency but delivers a lower bound of the “true” effect
Weather and Individual Happiness
Get PDF* Revised: Climate and Individual Well-being [11-01, 2011]This paper investigates the influence of weather on happiness. While previous studieshave examined climatic influence by comparing the well-being of people living indifferent regions, this paper focuses on how daily changes in weather affect individualsliving in a single location. Our data set consists of 516 days of data on 75 students fromOsaka University. Daily information on outside events, as well as the daily physicalcondition and individual characteristics of the respondents, are used as controls.Subjective happiness is negatively related to temperature and humidity. In a quadraticmodel, happiness is maximized at 13.9 degrees Celsius. The effects of othermeteorological variables—wind speed and precipitation—are not significant. Thesensitivity of happiness to temperature also depends on attributes such as sex, age, andacademic department. Happiness is more strongly affected by current weatherconditions than average weather over the day. While sadness and depression (negativeaffect) are affected by weather in a similar way to happiness, enjoyment (positive affect)behaves somewhat differently
Microenvironmental Regulation by Fibrillin-1
Get PDFSengle G, Tsutsui K, Keene DR, Tufa SF, Carlson EJ, Charbonneau NL, et al. (2012) Microenvironmental Regulation by Fibrillin-1. PLoS Genet 8(1): e1002425. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.100242