The aim of this study was to elucidate how individual differences in noncognitive skills, as measured by the Big Five personality traits, explain variation in labor market outcomes. Japanese and U.S. survey data were analyzed to examine the associations between personality traits and later...

Extant research has found that an individual's happiness is relative with respect to income, suggesting that it rises with own income and falls as the income of a reference group increases. Some recent studies emphasize that the effect of relative income is mediated by the extent to which people...

This paper attempts to test the morale theory of nominal wage rigidity by identifying the causal effect of pay cuts on workers' income satisfaction and work morale. This paper uses the current deflationary recession in Japan to estimate this causal effect. Our original survey of Japanese firms...

This paper attempts to estimate the causal effect of public capital stock on production using Japanese prefectural data. We first articulate the difficulty of consistently estimating the regional-level production function with public capital due to the endogeneity of the public capital stock...

This paper considers the demand for job training and its interaction with organization adjustments through rotation within a team and relocation across teams in response to demand and supply shocks. The analysis includes estimations of determinants of on-thejob training, and of how much such...

Recent studies report that productivity increases under tournament reward structures than under piece rate reward structures. We conduct maze-solving experiments under both reward structures and reveal that overconfidence is a significant factor in increasing productivity. Specifically, subjects...

This paper investigates whether the level of happiness and integrated process of changes in happiness are the same. Using the daily data of two waves of four and six months each, we found that the level of happiness is stationary, whereas the integrated process of changes is non-stationary with...

Studies in psychology have long argued the possibility that sibling structure, such as birth order and the gender of siblings, shapes one's feminine and masculine personality traits, such as a preference for competition. In light of recent developments in the economics literature on the gender...

After severe disasters, persons living not only in the directly affected areas, but also in distant areas could be seriously affected thorough images of the disaster on television and in newspapers. Hence, it can be difficult to define qualified beneficiaries for policy compensation in terms of...