Unless free international lending/borrowing is allowed, domestic saving equals domestic investment and hence saving and investment taxes have the identical effect, as is the case in a closed-economy context. However, if it is allowed, households can accumulate foreign assets besides domestic...

By combining our broad panel survey of Japanese adults from 2005 to 2008 and actual cigarette tax data, we investigate how smoking behavior including responses to tax hikes depends on time discounting and its biases, such as hyperbolic discounting and the sign effect. Cigarette consumption...

Analysis of an original nationwide Internet survey reveals that health-related behavior shows associations with three aspects of time discounting: (i) impatience, measured by the overall discount rate; (ii) present bias, measured by the degree of declining impatience in the generalized hyperbolic...

Designing efficient environmental policies requires knowledge about households' preference parameters for their intertemporal decisions. By conducting an original Internet-based survey using Japanese participants (n=2,906) and a follow-up survey (n=1,407), we examine how people evaluate...

We examine and verify our hypothesis from a theoretical model that parents are more likely to be authoritative if they are from a wealthy family. Using the data from the Preference Parameters Study of Osaka University, Japan, we find that there are significantly positive associations between...

Analysis of an original, broad, internet-based survey reveals that debt holding is related to three aspects of time discounting: present bias, measured by the degree of declining impatience in the generalized hyperbolic discount function; borrowing aversion, captured by a sign effect -...

Economic interdependence of heterogeneous habit forming consumers is examined by using a two-country model. Due to endogenous interest rate adjustments, consumption-habit dynamics in one country are affected by the other country's habits and preferences. To characterize the interactive dynamics,...

In view of the finding that debtors are likely to be more obese than nondebtors, we investigate whether interpersonal differences in body mass are, as in the case of debt behavior, related to those in time discounting and time discounting anomalies. The effects of time discounting on body mass...

The delay effect, that people discount the near future more than the distant future, has not been verified rigorously. An experiment conducted by us in China confirms that, by separating the delay from the interval, the delay effect exists only within a short delay. The results are reliable,...

In a two-country model with habit formation, we focus on interdependent macroeconomic adjustments to global and country-specific income shocks. Global habits and habit differentials play key roles in the global equilibrium dynamics, possibly nonmonotonic, and in the determination of...