After severe disasters, persons living not only in the directly affected areas, but also in distant areas could be seriously affected thorough images of the disaster on television and in newspapers. Hence, it can be difficult to define qualified beneficiaries for policy compensation in terms of...

This paper showed that the drop of propensity to consume in Japan during the lost decade is attributable to increase of income risks, mainly due to rises in unenployment rate/ To asses the impacts of income risks, we used the buffer stock saving model and a numerical method. The buffer stock...

Economists have long been concerned that negative attitudes about relative income reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such attitudes can be mitigated by a simple information treatment. Toward this end, we conducted an original randomized online survey experiment in the US and...

Economists have long been concerned that negative attitudes about relative income reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such attitudes can be mitigated by a simple information treatment. Toward this end, we conducted an original randomized online survey experiment in the US and...

This paper uses Japanese data which includes measures of self-declared satisfaction, reference-group income, and the direction and intensity of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues, and compare their incomes more. The relationship...

We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model of households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different@equilibrium consequences: under the ratio...

The caste issue dominates a large part of India's social and political life. Caste shapes one's identity. Furthermore, strong tensions exist between castes. Using subjective well-being data, we assess the role economic comparisons play in this society. We focus on both within and between-castes...

This paper evaluates how caste influences economic comparisons in India. Using happiness data from an original panel survey, we find that both within-caste comparisons and between-caste comparisons reduce well-being. Between-caste comparisons reduce well-being three times more than within-caste...

We investigate people's dierent conceptions of the economic term consump- tion when comparing with others. An Internet-based hypothetical discrete choice experiment was conducted with Japanese participants. As in other relative income comparison studies, we found that own consumption and own...

This study augments a second-generation Schumpeterian growth model to employ human capital explicitly. We clarify the general-equilibrium interactions of subsidy policies to R&D and human capital accumulation in a unified framework. Despite a standard intuition that subsidizing these...