This paper studies household spending responses to anticipated changes in the consumption tax. To do so, I construct a life-cycle heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with durables. The model features a wedge in durable transactions that reflects the actual consumption tax system:...

This paper discusses three alternative assumptions concerning household preferences (altruism, self-interest, and a desire for dynasty building) and shows that these assumptions have very different implications for bequest motives and bequest division. After reviewing some of the literature on...

This paper discusses three alternative assumptions concerning household preferences (altruism, self-interest, and a desire for dynasty building) and shows that these assumptions have very different implications for bequest motives and bequest division. After reviewing some of the literature on...

A model of rational addiction (RA) with optimal inventories is developed and empirically tested using data on purchases in Japan. If a consumer has information regarding a future price increase, then she may hoard addictive goods; in this case, the optimal inventory period increases with the...

Employing the Japan-U.S. international survey, this study analyzed the cause of rising perception of the widening income gap in Japan. Between these two countries, their distinct value judgments on the substance of gap influence their recognition. Japanese have negative perception of the income...

In this paper, we use provincial panel data on China for the 2002-19 period to conduct a spatial autocorrelation analysis of household saving rates as well as a dynamic panel analysis of the determinants of household saving rates using a spatial Durbin model. To summarize our main findings, we...

A literature debates the explanations for the cyclical properties of emerging markets using either trend shocks (Aguiar and Gopinath 2007) or financial frictions (Neumeyer and Perri 2004; Garcia-Cicco, Pancrazi, and Uribe 2010). We state a formal proposition that makes explicit the parametric...

What are the consequences of the preference for wealth for the accumulation of capital and for the dynamics of wealth inequality? Assuming that wealth per se is a luxury good, inequality tends to rise whenever the interest rate is larger than the economic growth rate. This induces the economy to...

In this paper, we conduct a dynamic panel analysis of the determinants of the household saving rate in China using a life cycle model and panel data on Chinese provinces for the 1995-2004 period from China's household survey. We find that China's household saving rate has been high and rising...

This paper investigates empirically why Japan's household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but...