This study uses product-level international bilateral trade panel data for the period 1995 to 2009, covering 40 countries from the recently released World Input-Output Database (WIOD). Constructing this dataset into a standard gravity model, this paper aims to compare the magnitude of...

This paper examines the role of structural change in productivity growth in Japan, focusing on her recent "lost decades", with reference to the United States. Japan is now known to have a sharp slowdown in productivity growth in the 1990s, when we find a slowdown in intra-industry productivity...

In this study, we explore the causal relationship between length of stay (LOS) in hospitals and the treatment outcome for Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) patients in Japan, where the average LOS (ALOS) is the longest among OECD countries. Using chart-based data, we address the endogeneity...

Using 1,045 pairs of Japanese monozygotic twins, we examine differences in educational attainment by considering both the years of schooling (quantity) and the reputation of the last attended school (quality). We find that a difference in learning performance at 15 years of age is one of the key...

Vietnam is attempting to achieve universal health insurance coverage by 2014. Despite great progress, the country faces some challenges, issues and problems. This paper reviewed official documents, existing reports, and related literature to address: (1) grand design for achieving universal...

The paper estimates both the gender gap in wage and net schooling enrollment from Vietnam household data. The results imply a reflection of gender wage gap in the labor market in hazard of school withdrawals. Generally, males have higher incentive to terminate their schooling to join the labor...

Recent research has shown that low-income households have a higher probability of babies being born underweight, which is an indicator of poor health. The causes and effects of the weights of newborn babies need to be analyzed in Japan, where the proportion of low-weight babies is extremely high...

Public hospitals in Japan are recently facing management difficulties and some are in bankruptcies. To tackle the problem, drastic management reforms are required. In this paper, we employ factor analysis to construct indices to evaluate local public hospitals in terms of financial managements,...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of labor market conditions and poverty on crime using the prefectural panel data for each five years from 1980 to 2000. When estimating these relations, it is often the case that endogeneity causes biased estimator. Therefore panel data and Instrumental...

This paper analyzes the relationship between provision of earthquake risk information and residents' willingness to pay (WTP) for disaster risk reduction by the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), using questionnaire survey data on the purchase of earthquake insurance in the Tokyo Metropolitan...