TAmalgamation incentivizes municipalities to increase public debt because it allows them to subrogate their repayment and interest burden on the entire municipality after amalgamation. Especially, the smaller municipality tends to accumulate public debt in order to free-ride. Previous literature...

This study considers the factors behind municipality amalgamations in Japan from fiscal year 1999 to 2005 using event history analysis. We use discrete-time logit model and 21,165 parson-year data. Our findings show that the central government’s “carrot and stick” policy strongly...

Amalgamation offers municipalities an incentive to free ride when they can subrogate the load to a new municipality after amalgamation. Previous literature has clarified opportunistic behavior in local public bond issues. However, if the municipality does not have a leeway in policy decision...

In Japan, there is a shortage of long-term care facilities for the elderly and families are having difficulty supporting the elderly at home. Thus, the elderly in Japan often want to move to municipalities that have a greater availability in long-term care facilities. The purpose of this paper...

This study considers the discretionary premium-setting behavior of municipalities in the Japanese system of long-term care insurance (LTCI). Although, the LTCI system is managed by the municipality, but the financial system is controlled by national health insurers, and the municipality seems to...

This paper focuses on the increase in slack costs due to municipality amalgamation, which is pushed forward in several countries to achieve economies of scale. Employing the stochastic frontier cost function to estimate the inefficiency of local public expenditure due to slack, this study...

Municipal boundary reform (municipal amalgamation) has been done in many countries in recent years as the result of a push to enlarge the size and coverage of local government units, which in turn is driven mainly by the prospect of economies of scale. However, in a notable body of previous...

This paper uses survival analysis to examine the time taken to carry out municipality amalgamation in Japan in terms of both forming the amalgamation committee and completing amalgamation. The results show that municipalities that depend on local allocation tax grants as a revenue source, those...

This study considers market entry determinants for both for-profit and non-profit at-home longterm care providers in Japan. It examines market structure incentives and barriers to entry using a panel dataset of 48 Japanese municipalities for the 2003–2011 period. Estimation results show that...

Using municipality-level data of Japan, this paper empirically examines how the capacity of long-term care insurance facilities impacts interregional migration of the elderly. We construct net-migration data of the elderly population in each municipality by combining statistics available from...