The Vietnam Living Standard Surveys (VLSS) are supposed to be representative of the entire population in Vietnam. However, we uncover an anomaly that the amount of remittances received from domestic sources is significantly larger than the amount of remittances sent to domestic sources, implying...

Obtaining appropriate forecasts for the future population is a vital component of public policy analysis for issues ranging from government budgets to pension systems. Traditionally, demographic forecasters rely on a deterministic approach with various scenarios informed by expert opinion. This...

Since the 1990s, Vietnam has experienced a dramatic growth in remittance flows. This paper uses the Vietnam Living Standard Surveys for 1992/93 and 1997/98 to study the role of gender in these remittance flows, both from the perspective of receiving and sending remittances. Knowing about gender...

This paper aims to provide a long-term financial vision for the Vietnamese pension scheme using stochastic modeling for key variables under an actuarial framework. In particular, we project the pension fund balances in order to see whether the scheme will be financially sustainable. The median...

This paper provides an investigation of the impacts of pension funds on capital market development, both for stock markets and bond markets. For the overall sample of countries, we find that pension fund financial assets have positive impacts on stock market depth and liquidity as well as...

Mobile money service in Uganda has expanded rapidly, penetrating as much as over 30 percent of the adult population in just four years since its inception. We investigate the impact of this financial innovation on household welfare, using household survey panel data from rural Uganda. Results...

Japan’s outstanding debt keeps increasing and there are concerns regarding its sustainability. Nevertheless, the financial market seems to be neglecting such concern. Its growing debt level and subdued general price level are not easy to explain from the fiscal theory of price level (FTPL)...

We analyze the economic impact on key sectors of a compound disaster in Taiwan. While Taiwan has high-tech export-oriented industries such as semiconductors and electronic products, three out of four nuclear power plants are located in the at-risk areas close to its capital city with industrial...

Experiments with family groups are rare, but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate. I discuss some of the methodological challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major...

Forward guidance or more specifically policy duration commitment invented and developed by the Bank of Japan has become an essential part of unconventional monetary policy instruments employed by modern central banks. This paper’s simple empirical analysis finds that the market believes or...