Corruption norms are standards shared by members of a society regarding moral attitudes of approval and disapproval toward corruption. Finding out how to deal with corruption norms is a challenge for state building and economic development. This study attempts to deepen our understanding of two...

We develop a decision framework with imperfect information to analyze the effects of transaction costs on the tendency for individuals to remain with a default option. We demonstrate how transaction costs can be a more important source of such default effects than commonly thought. A further,...

In this paper, we estimate the impacts of local-government-sponsored pronatal policies on fertility by exploiting information on the geographical variation in policies across municipalities in Japan. We develop an empirical model that accommodates both the location and fertility choices of...

We estimate a household consumption function using two rounds of the nationally representative panel of living standard measurement survey (LSMS) of Nepal and simulate the impacts of remittance on poverty and inequality. We study how these impacts vary with the regional ‘incidence’ and...

We find a negative cross-sectional relation between heterogeneous beliefs and future stock returns in China, where short sale is prohibited in our sample period. Compared to other empirical works, which often be done in a market without short sale prohibition, we obtain this strong negative...

We develop a few numerical models to examine the moral hazard problems exemplified by Itoh (2003, Ch. 4), following our earlier study (Hashimoto et al. (2011)) on the adverse selection problems. To this end, we first model a risk averse or risk neutral entrepreneur who selects his action among...

Bayesian model averaging (BMA) has been successfully applied in the empirical growth literature as a way to overcome the sensitivity of results to different model specifications. In this paper, we develop a BMA technique to analyze models that differ in the set of instruments, exogeneity...

In 2010, concerns regarding Japan’s excessive dependence on imports for food and energy caused the Japanese government to introduce subsidies to stimulate biofuel crop production. In this paper, we study the viability of price subsidies and certain other policies with respect to increasing the...

This paper applies a time-varying cointegration (TVC) model to study regional financial integration, measured by the drifting cointegration coefficient of the long-term interest rates between Singapore and Malaysia. Conditioned on long-run exchange rate equilibrium, the evolving relation can be...

Economic analysis of nuclear accidents and their aftermath is comparatively rare. In this paper, in the light of the Japanese government’s intensive efforts to decontaminate areas affected by radioactive Caesium from Fukushima dai-ichi nuclear power plant, we create a cost-benefit framework...