The main purpose of this paper is to study how the individual differences in non-cognitive skills, as measured by Big-Five personality traits, explain the variation in labor market outcomes. By analyzing the Japanese and US survey data, this study attempts to analyze how personality traits are...

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-the job training, and of how much such...

This paper investigates whether Japanese people were happy and unhappy with the general election conducted on September 11, 2005, in which the Prime Minister, Koizumi, won a landslide victory. We conducted a large survey just after the election to ask people how happy they were and which party...

We measure differences between altruism toward a family member and toward an unknown foreigner using hypothetical questions in internet surveys across five countries: Germany, the US, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. Our analysis shows that people in all five countries exhibit greater...

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 how people's happiness depends on their current activities and on time. We conducted an hourly web survey, in which 70 students reported their happiness every hour on one day every month from December 2006 to February 2008. This method is an extension of the experience...

This paper investigates whether the Japanese voters became happy and/or unhappy due to the results of the General Election in 2009. We conducted a daily web survey for seven days before and after the election, obtaining 1068 responses. Estimating a fixed effects model, we found that supporters...

During the period of 2001-2006, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) adopted a market-oriented policy under the Koizumi cabinet. In 2006, following the formation of the first Abe cabinet, the LDP returned to a traditional redistributive policy. We assume that the supporters of the Koizumi cabinet...

It is widely believed that a rise in social status extends longevity. A handful number of studies examine datasets of candidates for prestigious prizes to exploit the causality. However, while some studies report positive relationships between receiving awards and recipients’ longevity, others...

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...