Background: China has five layers of government including the central government. Recently, some prefectural governments meet fiscal distress. Methods: We investigate the effects of urban and rural populations and area sizes on the expenditures of the prefecture-level local government by...

Background: China has five layers of government including the central government. Recently, some prefectural governments meet fiscal distress. Methods: We investigate the effects of urban and rural populations and area sizes on the expenditures of the prefecture-level local government by...

In this paper, we investigate causal relationships among exports, imports, and economic growth in North Korea by using time series data for the period between 1964 and 2004. The empirical results show that there was Granger causality from imports to GNP in the first half of the period. However,...

Medical school usually has the highest tuition fees among the university departments. The reason why students pay such expensive fees is that they estimate that their earnings will greatly increase after graduation. We construct a model about student behavior on entering college and estimate the...

In this paper, we investigate the asymmetry of adjustment costs for labour. Using monthly data on Japanese industries, we estimate a model of dynamic labour demand that incorporates adjustment costs for hiring and firing workers, and for changing working hours. Our estimates suggest the...

There are a number of indications that Japanese job security laws have been relaxed since the end of the 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to establish causality between job security laws and firing costs in the Japanese labor market. The analysis first investigates when and how firing costs...

Japan consists of many small inhabited islands in addition to four main islands. We examine the impact of fiscal expenditure and the number of tourists on per capita taxable income in remote islands using panel data analysis. The results show that both fiscal expenditure and population size have...